I can't speak for all ruby developers, but I have done enough Rails to have my own opinion. I can't imagine the situation where I would use a distro packaged Rails. I only need: - ruby - rubygem-bundler With that, I can create my app and pull everything else from rubygems.org and vendor it inside the tree, in a declarative way. I agree with Ludwig, the steps on -devel packages are confusing, but OSX users have it worse, and the majority of Rails developers probably use Macs. So, I would focus on making these steps easier, more than making a packaged Rails works. For example, as Ludwig described, the pattern could install the devel packages of the most important gems, but additionally, it could install something in the environment that sets NOKOGIRI_USE_SYSTEM_LIBRARIES=1.