openSUSE 10.3 is set to contain a new, significantly improved and more mature package management stack by default. ZMD, the package management component causing problems in SUSE Linux 10.1 and to a lesser extent in openSUSE 10.2, has been completely removed and is now replaced by the new libzypp and its tools.

Package management in OpenSUSE in recent years has had its share of challenges. In OpenSUSE 10.1, the package management was an epic trainwreck. Package management in OpenSUSE 10.3 is as good as that was bad. There are various types of speed improvements. Some of them huge. There is some caching of the repository package info. Progress bars so the user knows what’s going on.

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 11.0. The 11.0 release of openSUSE includes more than 200 new features specific to openSUSE, a redesigned installer that makes openSUSE even easier to install, faster package management thanks to major updates in the ZYpp stack, and KDE 4, GNOME 2.22, Compiz Fusion, and much more.

aptitude is a featureful package manager for Debian GNU/Linux systems, based on the renowned apt package management infrastructure. aptitude provides the functionality of dselect and apt-get, as well as many additional features not found in either program.

YaST works well but it's a bit verbose for installing a single package, and of course that's just more fodder for the apt-getters with all their apt-get install this and their apt-get install thats. And you can't argue with them, but there are other options with openSUSE: yum and apt4rpm come to mind, but the preferred solution is zypper.

What’s the single biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry? It’s an interesting question, and one that in my opinion has a very simple answer: Package management—or, more specifically, the ability to install and upgrade software over the network in a seamlessly integrated fashion—along with the distributed development model package management enabled.

Muon Package Management Suite is the package management application that will replace Kubuntu’s package manager when Kubuntu 11.10 is released next month. It is designed for Debian-based systems, so it could be used on similar distributions, not just on Kubuntu. In fact, it is included in the default repository of Linux Mint 11.

Adept is the graphical package management program included with Kubuntu, which is also available for Debian and other Linux distributions that use the apt package management system.

NixOS is designed as a test of Nix, a new package manager designed to overcome key problems with existing package managers. As a result, what you think of NixOS is likely to depend largely on your interest in package management.