As someone who uses CentOS & Red Hat at work and Ubuntu and Debian everywhere else, I'd have to say that yum and its distros is still far, far behind APT and its distros. Part of that is the design of the tools themselves, part of it is their default configuration (yum insists of re-downloading the package cache for EVERY SINGLE thing you do - really?!?), and a lot of it is the quality control of packaging and repositories by the distribution maintainers. For instance, Debian and Ubuntu have FAR more packages in their repositories, and I only very rarely have to use a PPA or compile something myself. With CentOS and Red Hat on the other hand, I can't even get a useful LAMP system up without adding at least one third-party repository, and the software we ship at work requires two or three. Furthermore, the Debian family does a much better job of segmenting packages into smaller pieces, meaning there are more packages, but you only have to install what you really need. I frequently find in RHEL-land that to compile something my build dependencies involve installing some massive package and a whole bunch of totally unrelated stuff, just because some library wasn't properly split off from an overall application framework or something. Now, yum is certainly an enormous improvement over manually fishing around for individual RPM files, and I applaud the developers for coming up with it, but the combination of APT's design and the far superior strict maintainer ethos demanded by Debian (and thus passed on to Ubuntu) will be keeping me solidly in the Debian/Ubuntu family for everything I have a choice in for the foreseeable future. - Tony Yarusso