Dangers of Ad-Hoc Installations

When installing software from a tarball or using "make install", there are often no checks to ensure that the installation won't clobber (blindly overwrite) files from other programs, or even system files.

Such installations can cause other programs to stop working properly, and in the worst case, might make your operating system unstable.

Ports systems keep the installed files separate from the operating system, and from each other, so that they can be cleanly installed and uninstalled without worrying about trashing your system.