Gentoo’s Portage and NixOS’ Nix are both interesting takes on package management. Both are powerful and open up a ton of flexbility to the user, but still do a lot of work for you.
Are there any other similarly interesting approaches to the package management problem?
I haven’t personally used these, but after some searching I found a few relatively new and experimental twists to the formula:
distri uses SquashFS images for all their packages and claims to be very fast:
spack is also a Nix-inspired package system that’s python-based, and it seems to allow for a lot of customization, you can even modify the dependencies / build parameters of a package when installing it.
flox is compatible with Nixpkgs, it seems to be an iteration on the idea with some improvements.
I wish there had been more movement on distri; it was quite promising, but it shows all signs of being dead.