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Pretty light-on article, but it reminds me of my first encounter with linux around the turn of the century. Tried out (something), ran straight into dependency hell.

Left it alone for several years. In 2005, tried out RedHat. Ran straight into dependency hell.

In 2007 I started again... but by this time, Debian had matured the concept of the package manager, and my biggest hurdle was defeated. Thank you, Debian :)

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FWIW, Debian's package manager (and its concepts of package repositories and dependency resolution) hasn't changed much since I tried it in 2001 -- and probably even earlier than that. Slackware and Red Hat were my first forays into Linux, and the dependency hell you speak of was enough to drive me to FreeBSD and OpenBSD in the late 1990s.

Accidentally downvoted you while trying to upvote. Sorry.

My apologies - I thought apt started getting traction around 2004/05. Thanks for the info.

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