20-100 *Except for Slackware, which does no dependency management (but contrary to lots of online sources, DOES have a package manager). Instead, Slackware installs a fairly comprehensive base system (It's something like 14GB installed for -current) and assumes you installed everything. It won't stop you from opting not to install things in the base system, but it assumes you know what you're doing and will fix dependency issues yourself.
This massive base system sounded horrible and bloated to me initially but I've grown to like it quite a lot. It actually installs most everything I want to use by default. When you want to use something that isn't in the base system, you generally would check to see if someone made a "Slackbuild", which is just a tar file with standardized contents (eg: the description of what it is, a README, etc), the crux of which is a shell script that will build it for you. Most of the time you don't have to change anything at all, especially if it's a fairly common piece of software, though you are encouraged to read it to see what it does before running it of course. Furthermore, the only bloat is in hard drive space consumed as it's configured to automatically launch actually very services. It's been a while but I would guess there are around 15 processes showing in top on a fresh install and boot. It also doesn't use systemd which is great!
One of the standard Slackbuild files tells you what the prerequisites are, which is frequently nothing at all because the base system includes so much and they assume you installed the entire base. If it does have prerequisites, you go and run those Slackbuilds first to install them before trying to build your target software.
I'm not passing any judgement on which is better or worse, I haven't even been using NetBSD for anywhere close to long enough to have an informed opinion. Just describing it here as just another way some systems have tackled this problem 🙂
I DO like it quite a bit better than any of the other Linux distros I've used, especially since I am currently on terrible rural USA internet so it's nice to have so much good software already on the ISO for me. Arch Linux in particular I find super annoying to use now because it installs practically nothing by default so you have to install a bunch of things every time you want to use something new. I'm glad Arch is around and their wiki is fantastic for all Linux users, but it is not to my personal preferences.
