What is your favorite package manager?

I use yay, it's pacman with AUR support. :)

FYI: ~~yay is no longer maintained~~ (Untrue! See response here). ~~Use paru instead~~ Consider paru as an alternative option; it's written in Rust and has better version tracking for *-git packages (won't miss upgrades if the AUR version isn't tracked, won't do pointless upgrades if the AUR version changes but HEAD remains unchanged)
- The latest release of yay was 3 weeks ago. Where are you seeing that it's not maintained anymore?
- Fellow paru user here - definitely a good choice.
- Fellow yay user here. Thank you for the advice, will check out paru!
came here to post this.

Also it always feels like I'm cheering for my system. :D

Debian user here, I just use apt. Really easy to use. I don't really think about being fond of a certain package manager, if it works, it works.

apk is scary fast. Makes spinning up a quick Alpine chroot with e.g. Go or Rust for building with Musl take like 10 seconds.

DNF. It's slow definitely but it has a lot of really cool features, and the output looks nice.

DNF transactions are excellent when you need to roll back operations!

Pacman, indeed.

Portage, naturally 😀

I used to like portage a lot when I first tried gentoo. I was like dam I really have to build every single thing. I just want this. don't get me wrong Gentoo keeps your system maintained clean and minimal but just the time compiling got my wife angry lol
- It can get tedious on a single machine. Once you have enough for a binhost to start making sense... Now we're talking 🤣

I'm using pacman with paru right now, but I have to say than installing flatpaks has been a really nice experience on my postmarket-os phone and on desktop as well. I am using Gnome Software to install and run with two clicks, feels very snappy.

My favourite is pacman. I actually like the syntax. It feels very UNIX-y.

I'm a fan of the refresh (-y) and upgrade (-u) options being separate flags that can be used separately or together. I also find pacman's output to be very clean and readable.

Whenever I use apt, I find it slightly annoying that I need to invoke update and upgrade (and dist-upgrade) separately. I also find apt spits out a lot of unnecessary output, resulting in an unreadable wall of text.

I haven't used yum/dnf much, but the few times I used it I was slightly annoyed that it seems to insist on refreshing the repositories every time it runs.

Nix on NixOS - pin any version of a package you want, multiple versions of the same package, works on all Linux distros and MacOS, and with Home-Manager it can even manage your dotfiles.

pacman and apt are king. I usually go between arch and demon when I'm using Linux. I prefer arch since it's barbones

Can it be emerge? I love calling software forth from the depths.

emerge is the command but it's called Portage, ackshually. And yes, it's the best.

Portage, of course.

I like flatpak because the apps run on all distros!

My favorite is pacman (BTW, I really like the syntax), but I'm on openSUSE now so I deal with zypper, which works really well but I'm not a fan of the syntax.

pacman and that's because the syntax is perfect. If a distro doesn't use pacman I usually don't even consider using it.

I don't think any of them are very good, but DHL is by far the worst

I like msi or winget

Ah yes, the oft-forgotten furtive GNU/NT user
Chocolaty is superior

portage

I’d like to put in my 2 cents for pkgsrc

It’s not the sexiest, fastest or most full-featured but having a package manager that can bootstrap on anything even remotely smelling of Unix is awesome. And it sits cleanly next to whatever native package manager may exist.

pkgsrc drew me into NetBSD and becoming an official developer was a proud and happy moment.

Hey, thanks for suggesting pkgsrc! Do you have any experience using it on systems where you don't have root access, i.e. you need to install software in your home directory? Is it a good fit for such scenarios?
- Yes! You’ll have to use pkgsrc from source. The bootstrap script has an unprivileged flag.
  
  See: https://netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/platforms.html

homebrew, because I'm mac guy.

I use Linux since 2004 and have a lot of experience with all kinds of different package managers. I use all these actively on different systems right now and I like them best in this order:

flatpak > apk > paru / pacman > portage > apt

Used to prefer portage over everything, but as I got older, with 2 little children, etc. I just don't want to use source-based stuff intensively any more. Nowadays, I prefer to just install my sheit and have it work.

Kubuntu comes with Apt, and from time to time I use Nala too.

Nix, 100%

apt or pacman. DNF is pretty slow, though.

I love dnf just for its search function, I literally cannot use apt to search for packages its so much worse than dnf in that regard.

Dnf searches take so long to run though, whereas pacman is near instant. When I moved to fedora, I seriously miss the speed of pacman
- Speed is lacking, but it always gets me the results I want. I used Arch for a short time but don't remember the experience searching for packages. (I also really liked Arch's way of naming packages)

You will all hate me but... Snaps! First time I could easily roll back a bad version of thunderbird (I use it for work -office 365) which got stuck in a oauth2 login loop. I had to roll back twice (again, single command, everything just worked) then finally an upgrade where the bug was fixed.

Don't get me wrong I've pinned versions before with apt etc, but I always end up forgetting and having to remove them afterwards.

And... The only reason I was using the thunderbird snap was cause the regular apt thunderbird had some other annoying bug.

Yep.... Snaps... (Shake my head and walk away)

xbps, it's the fastest one I've seen but the syntax is kinda weird

I like apt for its syntax, I like yay for it's speed and ease compared to pacman.

Pacman has absurd option syntax, I think to deliberately make it feel exclusive. If the first thing you need to do is create a bunch of aliases or a crib sheet for basic things then it's a terrible user experience.

xbps