One of the few things that differentiates the major distros is the package manager. I’ve been running void on my laptop for the last 3 years and love it. XBPS is super fast and easy to use. It has never left me with a broken system either. That said, I’ve got the itch to switch.
I am looking at rolling / up to date distros. I’m inclined to use CLI when available.
I’ve been considering Opensuse, but last time I used zypper it was painfully slow. Has it gotten any better?
I was thinking of trying Alpine, how is APK?
Not interested in *butu, but apt seemed okay.
What’s your favorite and how does it behave?
Stick to Void. Everything else will look slow. Haven’t moved since I started using it.
Void was a great experience last time I used it. A minimal set of tools/software were installed(for some reason, I dislike ISOs/distros that fill everything from Libre Office to an FTP client in it; I will just download them if I want it), the package manager seemed pacy enough and system was fast. It is definitely one of the better distros I have tried.
I run Void a netbook from 2012, I am always blown away when it resumes from sleep faster than I can open the lid. For the first day I thought maybe it wasn’t suspending and sleep was broken.
It’s soo good. It’s taught me most of what I know about Linux. And, without getting into a battle over inits, I just love the simplicity of runit.
If you don’t want Ubuntu, you can still have Debian. All the apt goodness without the Canonical drama.
Ever consider Gentoo?
I haven’t honestly. Isn’t that one that takes forever to install because it builds the packages as you install the system?
Forever, no! Sure, compiling Firefox with some flags on my slow system can take ahem, time but I can install Gentoo in couple of days.
Though, in all seriousness, Gentoo takes a notch higher than Arch and unlike Arch, which has many entry level distros based on it, Gentoo has comparatively lesser. It’s fully usable but takes some initial time configuring and setting up the system exactly to the user’s requirements. The package manager is portage, I think.
I read somewhere that chromeos is based on gentoo.
That said, Gentoo isn’t what I would recommend to someone hooked on Xbps.
You’re going to be impressed with NixOS. You might still hate it because of the learning curve, but it offers you the ability to have both stable and nightly packages in one system.
If you mess something up, you can just boot into the previous configuration.
I know, so cool. I am open to learning, but I am not sure I am in for that depth of education :)
APK is really fast
Not a global opinion here as many hardcore linux users will stand by Arch or Mint, but I always have preferred Debian. It’s what Ubuntu is based on, so it uses apt(itude), yet it’s not prebloated Ubuntu and much more true to adaptation and unedited software than Ubuntu has become… But in the end it’s more personal choice and taste, so usually requires a bunch of failed attempts to get one that fits, as every linux can basically do the same things, yet on some or other slightly different way… 😜
I just want to add that for Debian with a rolling, up-to-date experience, Siduction does that nicely.
Thanks, Sid hasn’t been on my radar. Ill go have a look. I happen to have a ZFS box up in rsync.net running Debian, and it’d be nice to learn more about CLI in the deb world.
