I have been using linux for about 2 years now and I have enjoyed every second of it. What in your opinion is the best package manager the linux community has ever offered to us? dpkg, apt, yum, pacman, xbps, zypp, nix, guix, portage, 0install and other tons of them that are out there.
I’m quite fond of zypper. The output is well-formatted, the shorthand commands are easy to remember, it generally behaves as you’d expect it and it’s really damn reliable.
You can side-grade from openSUSE Tumbleweed to openSUSE Leap or back, by just replacing the repository URLs and doing a dist-upgrade. I’ve done that probably 10 times already and it only failed on me once, which was after telling me clearly upfront that it would fail, so I can’t even hold that against it.
Have used Tumbleweed. OpenSUSE is an underrated distro imho. YaST is great. Although, imho, Zypp seems super slow BUT an update has never broken on me and yes, like you said, output is well formatted and the shrothand commands are very easy to remember! like using al for app lock ll for list lock and all. very easy to remember. Zypp is definitely in top 5 for me. (:
Yeah, ZyPP uses a SAT Solver, so it basically does a mathematical proof that the dependencies can be satisfied. So, assuming there’s no bug in the solver implementation and dependency information on packages is correct, it cannot fail, but that’s what makes it somewhat slower than the package managers that increment versions more naïvely.
You might also still remember zypper feeling slow, because it refreshed with every command. It doesn’t do that anymore. Now it only refreshes when the last refresh was a little while ago.