To be honest, I'd rate pkg-ng higher than apt and dpkg these days. It's faster, cleaner, and uses an SQLite database as the backend, which allows for much more

To be honest, I'd rate pkg-ng higher than apt and dpkg these days. It's faster, cleaner, and uses an SQLite database as the backend, which allows for much more interesting queries for figuring out system state. For the base system, FreeBSD has an in-place binary updating system called freebsd-update that works rather well. I'd definitely encourage you to try FreeBSD, it has a beautiful amount of cleanliness that's missing from current Linux distros.