I'm a Debian fanboy, but in all honesty, the RPM-based distros have long since caught up with apt in terms of sophistication.
I did find yum (the apt equivalent used by Red Hat and friends) a bit slow (it's written in Python) and slightly rough on the usability front in some cases, but perfectly serviceable.
Mandriva and its derivatives (Mageia is worth looking at) use urpmi to provide the equivalent of apt. I really, really like urpmi, but none of the distros that use it have satisfied me (for unrelated reasons).
SuSE and friends have advanced package management baked into YaST, which handles other configuration and setup tasks as well. I haven't used SuSE in ages, but it the package management seems pretty robust.
Yeah, i've always found that quite odd. Do you seriously need to refresh the package db every. single. time? I might agree that cron-based/user-initiated solutions are suboptimal (some users will just not bother, which is a security and support problem), but surely there is a compromise, like limiting the refresh to once a week.
(Cue some RedHat fanboi saying "but it's easy, you just do xyz" -- no, it's not easy unless it's default behaviour. Otherwise we might as well just run OpenBSD, because opening network ports every time you have to sneeze is "so easy".)
I did find yum (the apt equivalent used by Red Hat and friends) a bit slow (it's written in Python) and slightly rough on the usability front in some cases, but perfectly serviceable.
Mandriva and its derivatives (Mageia is worth looking at) use urpmi to provide the equivalent of apt. I really, really like urpmi, but none of the distros that use it have satisfied me (for unrelated reasons).
SuSE and friends have advanced package management baked into YaST, which handles other configuration and setup tasks as well. I haven't used SuSE in ages, but it the package management seems pretty robust.