tlmgr not available for Ubuntu

One of the hardest things about LaTeX is the way it manages packages. Doing it manually is (in a word) annoying. When I was on windows I loved MikTeX for the ease by which it downloaded and installed extra packages, and I was disappointed when this functionality wasn't available on Ubuntu. Lately though I discovered that TeXlive had a similar package manager called tlmgr, and I started getting excited. When installing TeXlive though, I was dismayed to find that tlmgr did not work. A bit of a google search later I found that this was reason:

There is no way that a second package manager independent of the normal packaging infra structure (apt here, or rpm, or whatever) can work, because it will break the main system.

TeX Live Manager is currently only for system trees. THere is a patch in the dev repository for activating user mode, so that tlmgr can be used to manage TEXMFHOME, but it has not been worked on since quite some time (Norbert Preining on launchpad.net)

I take this to mean that there's only room in Ubuntu-town for one package manager, and synaptic is it. This is fair enough I guess, but it is still unfortunate.

Norbert goes on to say "get your hands dirty and help coding!" Unfortunately, my perl is non-existent, so I'll have to give it a miss until such a time as I actually have some idea what I'm doing.