Bazaar (flatpaks) because of its aesthetics and ease of use. Also, it's a good way to find niche apps directly published by their authors.
I also now avoid the AUR altogether.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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flatpak because I love ragebaiting
Apt-get is legit!
AUR because it sometimes comes with bonus packages. Last week I downloaded a text editor and got a free crypto miner on the side
Apt because...it's all I know 😅
I think my favorite to use is apt, the various incantations you use the most are nicely spelled out and if you need some nitty gritty you can just call dpkg directly.
From my first 8 years distro surfing, apt sure is my most familiar to use; most in muscle memory. So many debian and ubuntu respins.
Well I dont know what to like about it, but I`m using mainly debian and fedora...so apt and dnf
Nix
Kudos.
It's not one I've sank my teeth into as a daily driver yet, but, yes... as near a faultless choice as one can make.
yay because it's fast and zypper because it's intuitive.
dnf out of the two that I've tried. It's a little more streamlined than apt, it seems.
Portage.
Portage is the only one that makes sense to me. It doesn't try to hide it's internals from the user
Yup.
Invites, even demands, the user have a look and get their hands on, just to use. Very good, keeps userbase more astute. No "convenient" plastic wrap, to keep users ignorant, disempowered and dependent.
Even today, I was looking into updating an ebuild, when a package in an overlay seemed lagging on maintenance, and was no longer successfully emerging. I'd not bother looking into doing such on other distros[1].
::: spoiler 1 oh, exceptions! (... well, maybe yeah, on CRUX, KISS, or Carbs, but that's different ~~ a little ~ still keeps the user apprised of internals (albeit by having even less). I'm still more glad for portage, over those gorgeously simple distros, what with the convenience and power of useflags, savedconfigs, patches, profiles, even keywords (and slots (lol))... convenience that still to access, beckons one into learning more about the system. Portage, still easy choice. Fave. ... Though... Paludis exists too... And that other one, I forget the name of. [Edit: pkgcore] ).
I haven't used Gentoo in maybe 15 fifteen years or so but it was definitely the funnest to use
(Despite the python)
There's always Paludis. It's basically "Portage but C++". And seems to emphasize decentralized repositories more. I've never used it personally, but I've been curious since I learned of it.
Paludis
Thanks. Yeah.
I've dove into Exherbo installs, enthusiastically, several times, aspiring "this time, I'll immerse myself like it demands, and make it my daily driver". Yet to take. [Close, at least a couple times]. Love it to pieces still though. Never had the gall to try paludis in gentoo yet though [not even briefly to see how distinct from Exherbo's quirks of implementation]. I do love its philosophy of decentralised repos, mirroring / resulting from, the philosophy of all users are developers. ... Maybe another 19 years in gentoo bootcamp, I'll be ready to give Exherbo the dedication it demands, to be able to properly use it. ... Until then, portage remains fave.
C++
How long until there's a vibe coded drop-in replacement for portage/paludis/pkgcore written in rust? :3
apt and dnf
Is brew a package manager? That.
On macOS, but it seems like using apt on Linux (command line) back in the day.
Alpine apk, it is simple and really fast, and I love that there’s a file where I can just type the programs I want, and then it installs them. And with the chimera linux cbuild system it is just incredible
Yum, because its reminds me of food.
I like using apt packages as long as I am using nala as the CLI. it is such an upgrade.
appman