Rabbit Hole

Take a look at this page. It's Debian's package page for the retroarch package. It provides a huge list of dependencies. On Slackware, the same program doesn't have a single dependency. The OS comes with a huge set of applications and libraries preinstalled, so that the installation of new packages is also simplified: you have the dependencies by default. There are also fewer conflicts where different packages share a dependency but require a different version. This is the most straightforward way of installing packages that I've encountered.