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?
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.
Went with Arch and Fedora simply for the parallel downloading. I tried xbps , the only turn off for me was the fact that feature was missing otherwise void is best to stick with.
You know pacman has parallel download support right? I’m pretty sure it’s at 3 by default.
Interesting fact! If you’ve had an arch machine for a while, it’s possible you didn’t know that parallel download support is available, because it’s a config option hidden in pacman conf.pacnew (I know I didn’t realize it until months after, lol).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman#Enabling_parallel_downloads
I would recommend playing around with containers instead of doing a reinstall. Containers give a similar experience without so much work
LXC is killer. You can spin up containers that ‘feel’ exactly like a VM but with way less overhead.
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
