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Because switching just the package manager will yield no benefit at all. Having apt as the common package manager among Debian derivatives is meaningful because

Because switching just the package manager will yield no benefit at all. Having apt as the common package manager among Debian derivatives is meaningful because those distributions get most of their packages from Debian, so they use not only the same package manager, but also same packaging format, same file system hierarchy, same package names/package splitting. All Fedora derivatives, OpenSUSE and Mandriva(?) would agree on using dnf but that would provide no significant benefit at all (other than reusing muscle memory).

dredmorbius 11y ago
Most of APT packages' superiority comes less from the packaging format than the entire philosophy surrounding them, most especially in the case of Debian, Debian Policy. Quite simply, so long as I stay within distro, the quality of Debian packages greatly exceeds those of RPM packages (long-standing direct, multiple-instance observation of Debian, REHL/Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, and Suse systems). Some of the benefit also derives from the packaging format itself. The ability to unpack DEBs using nothing but shell tools (busybox within a Debian system's pre-boot ramfs is sufficient and has been successfully used by me -- Red Hat loses in this instance by using a ramfs shell that's both 1) larger than Debian's dash and 2) doesn't offer interactive use -- it's a scripting-only shell, FML. Joey Hess at one time had a detailed comparison of various packaging systems. He's pulled it apparently due to political / fanboi bickering, which is a shame. He's author of 'alien', a tool for converting between packaging formats. But Policy (and fucking enforcing the fucking hell out of it) trumps. Source: 18 years' use of both distros and many other Linuxen. 30 years' experience on further Unixen.