When used with aptitude, it's very easy to use, extremely powerful and flexible. Also, it has the most extensive knowledge on details of packages in terms of dependency graphs and modification of files which belongs to packages.
At least, that's what I saw in 14 years.
Looks like I need to resume learning it. Thanks.
Is there something else you are referring to? https://man.openbsd.org/installurl
I started trying it out with FreeBSD 10.0 a few years back. pkg was rough around the edges back then. If you had a lot of packages installed, like lots of development tools and desktop environments, it wasn't hard to get it into a situation where it would segfault or run into dependency problems during an upgrade. Right now, with 11.2, I've not run into any crashes for a good 2-3 years or any intractable dependency problems in a good 2 years or more. It's probably not perfect, these are very complex tools which are hard to verify, but it's certainly eminently usable from the point of view of an admin/end user/casual ports contributor like myself.
In fact, when upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 to 18.10 a few weeks back, I did actually run into a problem with apt refusing to upgrade because it couldn't work out the upgrade path. I had to remove a few packages which were causing problems, then re-install them after the upgrade. Whether that was apt or the packages having genuinely broken dependencies I'm not sure since I didn't investigate in detail.
Apt is certainly the best package manager in my opinion. I haven't used rpm based package managers in a while, but I doubt they don't have feature parity at this point.
I think the magic ingredient of apt that makes it work so seamless is the thousands of diligent maintainers behind it. That's the "feature" that none of the other packaging systems have at the moment.
I also have a deep respect for the raw no-nonsense approach of the various BSDs, but every time I try running it in a professional capacity, the apt eco-system lures me back.
As you point out, apt layer/functionality is provided by zypper, yum, dnf, etc. and the main difference is that it is not unified across the main rpm distributions. Still, Fedora/Redhat yum replacement, dnf, is built on SUSE/openSUSE zypper's solver library (libsolv).
That's ridiculous. `pkg` on FreeBSD is a thousand times more consistent and user friendly. Perhaps you are talking about the days before pkg-ng (next generation) became the default, but now installing anything is as easy as `pkg install foo` and it just works. It even updates automatically so URLs aren't out of date.