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?

  • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
    91·
    2 years ago

    If you don’t want Ubuntu, you can still have Debian. All the apt goodness without the Canonical drama.

    Ever consider Gentoo?

    • Charlatan@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      I haven’t honestly. Isn’t that one that takes forever to install because it builds the packages as you install the system?

      • kirk781@lemm.ee
        5·
        2 years ago

        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.

      • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
        11·
        2 years ago

        If you’re on Celeron, then yes it should take forever.

        Throw a decent quad core and you’ll be done with a fully functional desktop in a day!

  • iopq@lemmy.world
    7·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Charlatan@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Thanks for the heads up. That is something I’ve taken into consideration. I am curious how long I’d last on musl.

        • Charlatan@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          I never took a swing at musl, though I did kick it around a few times. I used my laptop for work for years and couldn’t afford to lose options for some apps. The gloves are off now :)

    • Drito@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      2 years ago

      Its frustrating because Alpine gave me the fastest desktop. I dropped Alpine because some apps requires Glibc extensions !