Slackware

Originally Posted by Neo

For one thing, I like all the Debian-style install tools like aptitude and apt-get...

Second, I like the huge install base and large community for Ubuntu and the way Ubuntu is well supported.

Zypper is the fastest and most powefull package manager front-end today. It uses SAT solver, wich is the best available dependency solution. It has many powerfull features Apt simply lacks like complete management within CLI. For example it is impossible configure/add/remove/enable/disable repository using APT command. Using Zypper it is simple task. Zypper has also the best informational output in nice tabular format, Yum is also great in this area. Zypper has also the best syntax format. You can run "zypper xxx" command in full or short format. It is far better to write "zypper in" instead of "zypper install". Almost every zypper command has such shortcut.

On the other hand Apt dependency solver is almost idiotic, and in addition it does not treat donwgrade as an option. Apt information output is chaotic mess and Apt syntax seems lika a bad joke at all. It is not a single tool, but some group of Apt-??? utilities completed without any sense. For example if You search package in package cache, you run Apt-cache command: "Apt-cache search". But when you want to refresh cache, you run Apt-get command: "Apt-get update". WTF???

Yum is far behind Zypper, but still much better than Apt, not because of features, but because it's usability. Yum has great informational output and syntax.


PS: Zypper can download packages in advance and install them at once as apt or yum, it is just not the default behaviour (from historical reasons) Open the configuration file /etc/zypp/zypp.conf and set:

commit.downloadMode = DownloadInAdvance

Since Opensuse 11.3, this behaviour will be default.

If you miss some feature in Zypper, it will probably be added soon. Although Zypper is the youngest project, it has themost features today and it is still under heavy development. Apt has not changed for years.