It's also useful for people who do have root access to a terminal, remote or otherwise, but want more up-to-date packages.

Some packages (my favorite example is youtube-dl) are useless if they're not up-to-date. And sometimes the new version has a feature that's really important to you.

I'm using it for ripgrep and node, for instance. ripgrep isn't available in apt, and the node version in apt is incredibly outdated.

There's a reason most software these days tells you to curl an installer and pipe it to bash, and that's because distro package managers never have the latest version.

Here's ripgrep's apt installation instructions:

    curl -LO https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/releases/download/0.10.0/ripgrep_0.10.0_amd64.deb
    sudo dpkg -i ripgrep_0.10.0_amd64.deb

There's no way I'm memorizing that. I'll have to google 'ripgrep' copy/paste it from the readme each time.

Linuxbrew is just so much easier:

    brew install ripgrep