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.
Yes. Chrome OS is heavily modified(and locked down) version of Gentoo but I doubt any end users of Chrome OS want to experience vanilla Gentoo :p.
Folks who use Gentoo do out of their own choosing, not because someone recommended it. It is quite technical a distro and takes some time picking up. Void, is comparatively way easier to come to grips with than Gentoo.
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!