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?
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).
I run Void a netbook from 2012, I am always blown away when it resumes from sleep faster than I can open the lid. For the first day I thought maybe it wasn't suspending and sleep was broken.
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.
You're going to be impressed with NixOS. You might still hate it because of the learning curve, but it offers you the ability to have both stable and nightly packages in one system.
If you mess something up, you can just boot into the previous configuration.
Not a global opinion here as many hardcore linux users will stand by Arch or Mint, but I always have preferred Debian. It's what Ubuntu is based on, so it uses apt(itude), yet it's not prebloated Ubuntu and much more true to adaptation and unedited software than Ubuntu has become...
But in the end it's more personal choice and taste, so usually requires a bunch of failed attempts to get one that fits, as every linux can basically do the same things, yet on some or other slightly different way... 😜
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.
Or you could just use distrobox and podman. It is way simpler and has even less overhead. There also is the benefit of having way more images as you have docker hub and fedora toolbox
Great suggestion. A few of the distro suggestions here are in the deep end of the Linux pool, so it's probably best to build them virtually to see how I want things setup.
apk isn't any more or less than using dpkg by itself, or opkg. As for what I use, I use Arch at home and Ubuntu on my virtual machines (because they're officially supported by my hosting provider). They work for me. I like them.
If you plan on trying Alpine, be aware that it's based on musl and busybox, rather than glibc and systemd, or whichever replacement you would usually go for. It's great for reproducible containers, but not so much for a desktop system
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.
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.
Interesting fact! If you've had an arch machine for a while, it's possible you didn't know that parallel download support is available, because it's a config option hidden in pacman conf.pacnew (I know I didn't realize it until months after, lol).
Alpine is great! Apk is super fast. The package selection isn't then best, but it's on-par with dnf and apt. My one gripe is musl/openrc issues, but you're already used to that if you use Void