Phoronix has an article up about some interesting ideas of Lennart Poettering about what could be a possible future for Linux:
Lennart Poettering of systemd and PulseAudio fame has published a lengthy blog post that shares his vision for how he wishes to change how Linux software systems are put together to address a wide variety of issues. The Btrfs file-system and systemd play big roles with his new vision. Long story short, Lennart is trying to tackle how Linux distributions and software systems themselves are assembled to improve security, deal with the challenges of upstream software vendors integrating into many different distributions, and "the classic Linux distribution scheme is frequently not what end users want."
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday September 02 2014, @02:06AM
I believe that you let out dpkg, but I understand why you might leave that off the list. If there's a .deb, there's likely already a package in the repository or you can just add the ppa. There's not too many systems out there that'd have dpkg and not have apt.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:06AM
dpkg is what works under apt-get. It's the same thing, just lower level. Normally you shouldn't touch dpkg directly.