Ask HN: The strengths of different system package managers
I don't particularly care about the UI part of this, because at the end of the day you can wrap a package manager any way you want; but you can't overcome the specifics of the dependency resolver or the package format.
Some of my observations:
- ALPM/Pacman has the best performance altogether. The commands are very powerful, if a bit inaccessible.
- RPM/DNF (and YUM before it) has the lowest network bandwidth utilization, on account of delta RPMs. Good choice of verbs, i.e. "update" to install updates, check-update for the less common use case of just fetching the repo data.
- DEB/APT has the largest install base, and although I've never encountered any particular strength to it, I don't think there's anything particularly bad about it. Slightly questionable choice of verbs with "update" versus "upgrade".
- pkg_add (and related random Perl scripts on OpenBSD) is not configured by default, and has some significant rough edges, but does work OK at the end of the day.