I still find places in the UK that run it but it’s less common now than it used to be.
I completely disagree with your point that anything not based in apt is horrible to work with.
I get the impression that people using Debian and their derivatives seem to live under a rock regarding other distributions.
I would trust zypper dup hundred times over apt-get dist-upgrade. This gets amplified by the fact that openSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling distro), is much better auto-tested before being published every week, than my experience with sid was (tested by their end-users).
Today's Redhat dnf package manager is based on SUSE's dependency solver (https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv), and both package managers provide a very nice user experience.
People seem to be still confused about SUSE "using YaST". YaST is just a front-end powered by libzypp (https://github.com/openSUSE/libzypp), like zypper is.
I'd never heard of Portage. Google indicates that it's Gentoo's package manager. It may be fantastic, but Gentoo is a hobby OS. Companies aren't going to use Gentoo. I'm not going to use Gentoo, because any benefits it has are going to be minimal, and it's never going to help my career.
There's a vast array of software out there that might be great for specific purposes, but I'm not going to swim upstream. So, while Gentoo and Portage may be fantastic, they're simply not on my radar, and certainly not on the radar of anyone I may work for.
I'm not disagreeing with you; we're just talking about completely different worlds at this point.
>So, while Gentoo and Portage may be fantastic, they're simply not on my radar, and certainly not on the radar of anyone I may work for.
Google's Chrome OS is a Gentoo fork.
Portage is not nightmare. Can apt run multiple unrelated installs in parallel?
In my experience pacman, APK, OpenBSD's ports and packages, and Slackware's pkgtools are all as good as or better than apt in various ways, with the caveat that Slackware doesn't do dependency resolution, which most Slackware users actually see as an advantage.
To put it another way, there is no perfect package manager, there is only the tool that works best for you. The above tools are what I feel to be the superior package management schemes in no particular order; apt has left me hanging way too many times to be comfortable with it on a production machine. For others (like you) the opposite may be true. Regardless, your statement only applies to you and shouldn't be presented as the gospel truth.