I’m wondering if a distro like the one I’m looking for even exists:
- simple as in KISS and vanilla. This excludes Debian where the package manager is too complex and packages deviate from upstream too much, as well as OpenSUSE, where systems administration relies on GUI tools too much and the package manager is even more complex.
- fixed release (excludes everything Arch-based)
So from the major distros, only Fedora is left as an option, where I really don’t know enough about it. Is it possible to do a minimal install of it? Is it built around a GUI app store? Does it rely on Flatpak like Ubuntu does with Snap?
Or are there other distros out there that I’m not aware of? Basically everything from the past 5 years I have no experience with. I’ve heard good things about NixOS, but it sounds weird as a daily driver.
If apt is too complex for you, I don’t know what to tell you…
I feel like you’re confusing “hard to use” with “complex”.
Apt is extremely complex under the hood, which shows when you try to build a package for it, or install a package with many dependencies then remove it again, leaving traces behind, or when you break your system by using different front-ends (apt, apt-get, aptitude, synaptic) which are all included in the default installation, but handle dependencies differently.
Most modern package managers have that level of complexity tho… That dependency tracking can take a lot of computation.
Maybe a notable exception would be Slackware package manager, but you won’t find what you’d expect from modern package manager (e.g. dependency resolving, autoremove package).
I find building packages with Gentoo to be much simpler than with Debian. Probably this is due to the fact that Gentoo users would regularly build their packages, unlike Debian.
I also learned Debian automatically generate dependency list by scanning the binaries of each package to see what dynamic libs it links. Bet that does add to the complexity by much.