dpkg / APT

From dragora, the pkg utility

dpkg/apt

Everything else feels like a cheap clone (Yum was a wasted opportunity).

I must admit I can only compare the ones I tried and they are rpm/yum and dpkg/apt . I think they are very comparable but I've used the debian system most and I find it easy to use. O'Reilly book Linux in a Nutshell compares them unbiasedly and they seem fairly equal in terms of functionality and ease of use.

I am not really that knowldgeable. I just use Linux as best I can. There is only ONE item on the voting list that seems familiar in some way "dpkg / APT", so I voted for that one. I did not even know that it is called a management system or whatever.
It would be really nice to keep it very, very simple for users like me and then you might have a lot more Linux users.
There are some things that I cannot do in Linux - at least I am not knowledgeable enough to do them. I am an author, and most book publishers require that I use Windows Word to format my work and uploaded to them. I tried it once by using LibreOffice and then saving as a Windows Word document, but this produced nothing but endless problems for the publisher's conversion to eBook system and so I finally went back to Windows Word and had no problems.
I have heard of Wine to access Windows programs like Word but have no idea nor inclination to get into a time consuming process of installing Wine and then trying to make it work properly.
It would be really nice if Linux came with Wine as part of a ready to use package and all automatic, or else have a perfect duplication of what Word does for requirements like my own.
Thank you.

dpkg/apt

Seems my favorite line is "apt-get update && apt-get install" I would not know what to do with out it.

I think the poll speaks for itself - dpkg/apt.

PiSi_Linux survives from Pardus_Linux, and Evolve_OS is pushing its envelope (as did the former SolusOS).

Arch does have a 'community' repo of precompiled packages, along with 3 others. AUR is not like the official repos -- it's just recipes to build packages. It's sort of like a wiki of build scripts. AUR helpers like yaourt make it easier for users to build and install packages from the AUR, but the only "official" way to use AUR is to download the recipes, review them, and use the makepkg tool to build them. All of the AUR helpers I've used make you review the recipes before building by default. The point is AUR is not trusted, only the official repos are. (I've never encountered or even heard of a malicious recipe, but there are some broken or wonky ones).

In any case, I use pacaur, which can be used in place of pacman. I can build and install it with a couple of commands, and then I'm able to use AUR like a regular repo, and not use pacman directly.

I'd say pacman is decent package manager; it gets the job done as well as any I've used. I voted for it because I like Arch's packaging ecosystem. Official repos for the things that large numbers of users want, and the AUR to make it easy to install whatever niche packages you want. Also, for a workstation, I like rolling release better than periodic updates.

Apt might be unbuntu based, is it not?

I am a Fedora user of rpm's and yum.

To upgrade an extire system just type 'su -c 'yum update''.

Then, watch the progress in console.

What you like is what you're used to. Most distros are built on Debian, so most people are used to deb packages. Personally, I think that the poll is rendered less useful by the concentration on tools, rather than packaging systems.

Having used Slackware since seemingly forever, I voted tgz/slackpkg. Apt et al is certainly easy to work with, what with the dependency resolution and all that Slackware lacks. When I'm working on a Raspberry Pi, dpkg/apt/synaptic gets used a lot of course. But on either system I find myself using good ol' ./configure --PREFIX=/usr/local && make && su -c "make install" often enough.

No problem. If you want to read more specifically about the package format, there is a rather dense (but readable, if you know anything about ebuilds!) document at http://www.exherbo.org/docs/exheres-for-smarties.html. This can help you see the advances on the package manager side that have been made.

On the distribution side, there are nice features like truly-distributed development so users can act more as developers (this is highly encouraged) than as simply downstream users. But that's related to the package format only in so much as the package manager has elegant support for multiple repositories.

No, dpkg, apt & synaptic are Debian package management systems, Ubuntu was based on Debian.
To upgrade an entire system we use 'apt-get upgrade', (or dist-upgrade to go from one version to the next).

yum for me. I've used apt extensively but its search ability just feels pitiful by comparison. I don't know what I would do without yum's "provides" support. apt also feels insanely slow by comparison, I don't know if it's the deb vs rpm package system or what, but in my experience yum runs in close to half the time with the same number/size of packages to install.

I do agree with the previous poster that said that when it comes to package management systems, for the most part people "like" what they're used to. Since the majority of Linux users use deb/apt-based distributions, that's the answer you're going to get, regardless of which system is actually objectively "better" (if there is such a thing).