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.
After I got over the beginner phase, yeah, I started liking minimalistic distros as well (basic set of tools, everything else is on repo or you can compile it through templates).
APK/Alpine is great! And the Edge repos are well stocked.
Chimera Linux seems to be using even newer apktools than Alpine, not sure what the deal with that is. But that distro is still in early stages with limited repos for now.
Pacman/makepkg/Arch is great too, and an obvious consideration for your usage, curiously omitted from your post.
Ah Chimera. I've been looking at that the last two days. I am really tempted to give it a shot. My laptop is mostly for playing around these days. Are you running it?
I forgot about Arch. I ran Manjaro for a year and didn't have the best experience. 'Course I was pretty green on Linux then.
No unfortunately I haven't tried Chimera yet, but its design is close to my ideal distro. I'd especially love to see its package repos fill up, but the selection is tight as it stands.
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.
I’ve been considering Opensuse, but last time I used zypper it was painfully slow. Has it gotten any better?
No, I am using TW for years and despise its package manager slowness. Apart from that though, TW is great. Have void on my laptop as well, sadly rarely use it currently.
