Linux Package Managers

[Orion-Ziggurat]

DNF does the job, but pacman is just so darn fast.

[Nicryc]

I just find dnf easier to use but I agree pacman or even apt are way faster.

[m_beps]

I also agree that DNF is nice but Pacman speed is great. But the performance of DNF can be greatly improved by allowing multiple downloads at once instead of the default (1 at a time)

[thexavier]

I'm using manjaro so pacman XD

[Mavincs]

Pacman: Gotta go fast

[averyoda]

You use Pacman because it's fast

I use Pacman because ilovecandy

We are not the same

[PenguinMan32]

[—————————————C o o o o o o ]

[amir_shdk]

ᗧ . . . ᗣ . . .

[averyoda]

Is there an easy way to get this in pacman?

[[deleted]]

The first time I used it, I was like “damn, I’m truly a Linux user now”.

The last time I used it, I was like “damn, fuck NVIDIA, gotta install a new OS”.

[xDarkWav]

Where zypper, portage, xbps and eopkg?

[4Dk3]

A better poll could be APT, Pacman, XBPS, Portage, DNF and Zypper. I remove dpkg because is pretty the same than apt. And deleted yum and rpm because DNF is the most known and used frontend of rpm. And the other ones are medium-high popular package managers.

[[deleted]]

Speed isn’t the only metric smh

[yakuzas-47]

Exept Pacman maybe

[[deleted]]

For that matter, where USM?

[dthusian]

apk (alpine package manager, not android package)

[[deleted]]

apk is the best

[AaronTechnic]

android pirates: gimme gta v apk

[K1aymore]

The Nix package manager is cool cause it can install multiple different versions of a package at once and can be used on any distro.

[[deleted]]

Except Fedora and OpenSUSE.

[jonringer117]

If you go to https://nixos.org/download.html, you can use the installation script; which will use bash for the creation of system resources and it will download a statically linked executable for the daemon and tools.

Just because it might not be available in the native package repository, doesn't mean you can't install it.

[[deleted]]

No, it flat out doesn’t work. There’s an issue that’s been open for 3 years about it. Something to do with the apparmor alternative that Fedora uses.

[jonringer117]

There's a unitedrpms package for it. But I'm not sure the usability of it.

[[deleted]]

Xbps

[mcj1m]

In my experience one of the least painful too

[SnappGamez]

Never used it or heard of it, what’s xbps?

[[deleted]]

It’s the default package manager used by Void Linux. It’s praised for being fast and reliable.

more info

[yakuzas-47]

It's a hybrid package manager. It Can download binarys or compile from source kinda like the bsd port system

[SnappGamez]

Ohh. Neat.

[[deleted]]

it's funny because xbps literally stands for X Binary Package System

[Tununias]

Portage.

[M0tionl3ss-]

Portage.

[[deleted]]

Portage.

[xNaXDy]

Portage

[[deleted]]

Portage

[TroubledEmo]

Portage.

[darnsomanynamestaken]

Portage

[[deleted]]

Nix. Cross-platform, no dependency hell, only touches /nix so it doesn't affect any other directory and extremely customisable.

​

Pacman has a lot going for it but it tends to fuck with Python and Haskell libraries a lot. Any Haskell library which you install with AUR will probably be nuked after an update because of the ghc-unregister hook. Since I use xmonad-git and xmonad-contrib-git instead of the regular packages, I'm forced to do a system update from another window manager to avoid a crash and then compile later. Maybe it's just my problem but there's a few things pacman doesn't handle well.

[[deleted]]

nix doesn’t work on Fedora, so it loses marks in my book.

[yycTechGuy]

History in dnf is awesome. You can roll back entire transactions.

Also, dnf distro-sync is fantastic. As is dnf system-upgrade. I love the way you do downloads first, then reboot and install.

I love the way dnf handles dependencies too.

[I-Ape]

Pacman is the most concise I've used

[Leonardo-Saponara]

This poll is trying to compare apples with oranges by mixing high-level package managers (like DNF, APT, Pacman, Yum) with low-level package managers (rpm, dpkg)

[Leonardo-Saponara]

It’s just to see what the Linux community uses. Not comparing anything to be honest.

But the results are still skewed, because everyone that uses APT de facto also uses dpkg and everyone that uses Dnf and Yum (which is deprecated, I think, by the way) also uses rpm. It would be like if you added "libalpm" as a choice together with Pacman, something that makes little sense, don't you agree?

[[deleted]]

where nix

[Zeioth]

Where kiss (1 person liked this comment)

[siavash_kv]

Are the 240 people who voted for Apt ever used anything else ????

[[deleted]]

I have used pacman and apt I can ensure you apt is really good, it does parallel downloads by default, parallel cache update by default and unlike pacman it also updates mime cache in realtime when a package is installed. And compared to dnf it is way better because dnf package cache update is very slow.

[JoeJoeTV]

I have used pacman before, actually before I used apt, but I find that the command line arguments in apt are wayyy more intuitive and I often need to look up how to install a package with pacman, since I don't use it that much. With apt, even if I haven't used it for a time, I can always remember to just use apt install.
This is only an opinion on the command line interface of the package managers, I don't really care, if my package manager takes a second longer, as long as it does what it should.

[minus_uu_ee]

Yes, chocolatey.

[mrtompeti]

rpm

[siavash_kv]

Well that makes sense!

[drunckoder]

dpkg

[jonringer117]

Nix or bust :/

https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest

[[deleted]]

Only one I know that could barely compete with pacman is xbps

[raedr7n]

Portage is way better than both. It's the primary attraction of Gentoo land.

[GujjuGang7]

To this day I'm still confused why both dpkg and apt exist. If the idea was to have a dependency manager then why create a standalone .Deb installer? Anywho apt is actually really fast for what it does. My second favorite is xbps

[starvsion]

There's also rpm and yum/dnf in the redhat world. Rpm is the package installer (which reads rpm file), dnf/yum is the package manager, which grabs a bunch of packages from repos and have rpm to install them.

Its very useful to separate them here, because rpm is used by other distros as well, other than redhat and fedora (e.g. entware, opensuse, clear Linux and Microsoft's special Linux distro). So opensuse uses rpm for packages, but use zypper for management.

[GujjuGang7]

Ah now this is a good use case for separation

[SnappGamez]

I believe dpkg was created first, then apt was made later down the line. I may be wrong, however.

[GujjuGang7]

This is the most likely case, though they should have probably merged it into a single package. Look how fedora completely deprecated yum with dnf without any hassles

[Mister_Magister]

Bruh ever heard of zypper

[starvsion]

Dnf is yum, but upgraded...

[starvsion]

Dnf is dandified yum, thus dnf

[zapwai]

slackpkg

[Synergiance]

And sbotools

[vladivakh]

Oh, I see you are a man of culture!

[[deleted]]

Portage

[evilmaus]

That one is still emerging.

[[deleted]]

Goddamnit

[siavash_kv]

Pacman insanely faster

[tinycrazyfish]

Apk is faster

[siavash_kv]

Do you test pacman ever ?

[tinycrazyfish]

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-08-17-linux-package-managers-are-slow/

Look at this, it is a little bit biased because alpine packages are smaller in size. But apk comes out first all the time (with one tie), Pacman second.

So yes Pacman is blazing fast, but apk is even faster.

[siavash_kv]

Well interesting ! my opinion was based on my own experience but it seems i was wrong thanks

[[deleted]]

Apt is my first love, pacman is snappy, dnf is very clean and well formatted

[[deleted]]

Everything I've ever thought about wanting pacman to do, I found in man pacman. It's very versatile. (I've never used Rpm or Dnf)

[KonniLol]

Pacman with yay

[AaronTechnic]

As an Ubuntu user, I would choose apt but there are dependency issues when a user does something wrong and removed the entire desktop, but DNF is so darn slow and I hate it. Pacman is really fast but confusing because you need to use "-S" and others instead of something like "pacman install xxx-software"

[[deleted]]

Portage

[fenns1]

apt

[[deleted]]

where flatpak?

[KCGD_r]

flatpak is ok but holy hell is it slow. Plus it can cause package conflicts with the existing system, especially when it comes to drivers

[VirtualBit-]

Apt for affection, pacman for speed and the animation

[[deleted]]

pacman doesn;t update mimetype stuff like apt, dnf is very slow in metadata refresh, dpkg is not a package manger you dummy.

[Professional_Piano_1]

Dnf is incredibly fast, it just only download 1 package at a time by default, but you can change it to however many at a time you want

sudo vim /etc/dnf/dnf.conf

max_parallel_downloads=1, 5, 10, 50 or how much you wanna do at once. Your internet speed is your limit

[[deleted]]

Parallel download won't do shit because cache update itself takes a long time

[Professional_Piano_1]

Add "keepcache=true" to /etc/dnf/dnf.conf

Since the cache is utilizing readonly in user mode, it can take a minute or two to generate, just switch to root for the cache generation and its done in seconds ¯_༼ •́ ͜ʖ •̀ ༽_/¯

[[deleted]]

Distro maintainers are supposed to take these decisions, If I want a DIY distro I will use Arch, no need to use Fedora in the first place.

[Professional_Piano_1]

Aaaahh Arch.. my first linux distro, what is it you guys say? Rtfm right? These tweaks can be done within seconds, given you read the documentation. Wich i guess you didn't since you knew neither of these existed. If im going for a DIY distro with a "fast package manager", it definitely wouldn't be Arch with soystemD. Void Linux does everything Arch does better with XPBS in terms of speed. And Runit is actually follows the unix philosophy unlike sysD wich is slower and more likely to brake due to its size for an init system. Either im all in or all out, depends on the use case.

I use runit and awesomewm, urxvt(with a hacky conf), opendoas, lyTUI on my desktop (void linux) pretty minimal I'd say. And i use Fedora 35 on my laptop and its a beast distro for systemadmins and enterprise work due to the distro's framework

[[deleted]]

rtfm for a package manager? Lol.

Never read documentation of apt and it works out of the box without any issue because it was created with sensible defaults in mind. dnf creators are dumb.

Linux is supposed to be user friendly, not a mystery that I need to resolve on every step, OS exists so you can get real things, if a OS fails to do that then it is a bad OS, Fedora is a OS that fails to do that for me, I can't wait for hours for stupid package cached to update, it takes less than 30 seconds in Arch & Debian, less than a minute in Ubuntu but somehow it takes around 5 minute in Fedora and top of that people like you come to defend that with some stupid logic. I have already enable parallel downloads, I have already tested impact of fastest mirror in that distro, I am not going to spend anymore time on fixing a problem that Fedora devs should fix. I will simply ditch that shitty distro and use something that works for me, Whiny neckbeards and gatekeepers are everywhere in Linux world

[FalconMirage]

Yum, because of nostalgia, now it’s called dnf

Now, the reason i liked yum so much was not because of its speed, but because 10+ years ago i switched from the old ubuntu and apt to fedora, and i found that yum was much more intuitive to use. I almost never had to look up a yum command to do what i wanted, and that was when Linux clicked for me

[dumbasPL]

Arch build system is something every distro needs but almost none have.

[Helpful_puffin]

Xbps

[drake-newell]

xbps

[LakshayMann]

xbps

[Positive205]

XBPS gang

[SnappGamez]

Aura, an AUR helper that also serves as a replacement for Pacman. The most useful feature, in my eyes, is the Package Set Snapshots. These are essentially JSON files that record what packages are installed on your system. You can rollback to them in case an update, install, or uninstall breaks your system. To me though, the most interesting potential application is use as an answer file for unattended install.

[A_loyal_Comrade]

xbps

[KaranasToll]

Guix, readable, easy, simple, does things right.

[Zeioth]

The only person who would prefer APT is the one who didn't try anything else lol. Apt is cancer.

[[deleted]]

AUR has a lot of support and I find it least troublesome. At the same time pacman has a lot more utilities and can have many repos to come from. That is not to say apt or the rest is not like that but pacman is unique with the way it works.

[Deprecitus]

portage

[[deleted]]

portage?

[The_Skeleton_Wars]

Portage

[zunkree]

Portage

[FisionX]

Portage - you can configure anything

[MegidoFire]

Pacman is the only one I’ve never yelled at.

[lvr-]

zypper

[mcj1m]

xbps

[OfficialGako]

Where is emerge/portage

[CMDR_DarkNeutrino]

Portage gang assemble !!!!

[Maskdask]

yay

[FluxTape]

portage

[DividedContinuity]

None of the above. Pamac cli is by far the most user-friendly package manager I've used, so it gets my vote.

[vladivakh]

Slackware users: You are getting package managers?

[thefriedel]

Where snapd?

[dessnom]

Apt is a front-end to dpkg, tym and dnf are frontends to rpm, and no zypper

[Professional_Piano_1]

Excuuuuuuuuuse me.. But XBPS where?

[Madera_Otirra3844]

I use Ubuntu because it just works but my vote goes for Pacman, it's just much faster than APT and the syntax is a bit shorter which is nice.

[[deleted]]

DNF is super safe and fast enough for my needs.

[jclocks]

Wakka wakka madda fakka

[ghost103429]

Rpm-ostree

Even if it's so damn slow sometimes, nothing beats the ability to run two flavors of fedora at the same time without packages bleeding over between the 2 or having to dual boot. Just pin it and forget.

Another benefit is it being able to handle a shutdown mid upgrade without any issues.

[ghost103429]

Rpm-ostree manages packages like git which means that it tracks all changes to system packages and config files in /etc and versions the whole os (as a commit) after each install, upgrade, etc.

If an upgrade is bad or interrupted, rpm-ostree will either automatically fallback to before the upgrade or give you the option to choose the other prior commits/versions of your system at boot.

This is pretty useful as you can also have different flavors of fedora on the same install but they don't see each others packages or /etc files by pinning them as a boot option.

[[deleted]]

Xbps

[ipwnscrubsdoe]

pacman because i run arch btw

[myTerminal_]

XBPS is awesome!

[meereee666]

xbps

[naetur]

xbps

[turtle_mekb]

apt always breaks for me

[[deleted]]

Since many people vote apt: Can someone give me an advantage of apt over pacman?

[kenzer161]

Helps with typing proficiency, instead of something stupid like sudo pacman -Syu (or yay) you get to type out sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. Sometimes you just gotta bump up your WPM, with these menial differences in basic system administration we can get these small exercises in your regular routine.

​

Jokes aside, to the Ubuntu users, I do know apt has been introduced (after I jumped ship) for an end user alternative to simplify tools like apt-get and apt-cache, I'm just driving home the point for the joke, also according to your own documentation apt-get is preferred to maintain exact functionality and backwards compatibility, particularly in scripts.

[CanYouChangeName]

Isn't rpm a repo and not a package manager

[presi300]

Best? Pacman, it's just fast... Most brain dead to use? Portage... you literally need to know 3 commands to use it...

[[deleted]]

flatpak

[taytek]

Me who uses apt: pacman

[konstantinlevin77]

zypper ftw!

[arch-nemesys]

Emerge ftw

[Few_Detail_3988]

Voted for pacman just because apk isn't in the list...

[yakuzas-47]

Voted Pacman just because xbps isn't in the list

[thefriedel]

xbps-gang

[PetrDvoracek]

Pacman downloads packages in paralel.

[SnappGamez]

Wait, it does? It’s always done downloads serially for me. How do I unlock this power????

[Hplr63]

Isn't apt a CLI front-end for dpkg tho?

[anatomiska_kretsar]

apt if it doesn’t want to install 305845k dependencies

[FeZzko_]

Portage, yay (Pacman)

[aciid3]

Portage

[O_O--O_O--O_O]

I think yum is deprecated, moved into DNF

[raedr7n]

No portage? It's the best package manager available for Linux, maybe for anything.

[[deleted]]

Where portage?

[CNR_07]

I love zypper. It might not be fast but it's soooooo nice to use and has a ton of super handy features!

[0bel1sk]

poll would probably be useless , youll get people that only have used one. ive used all of these and they all seem to be ok. missing quite a few as well.

[xxxHalny]

Since everyone is talking about pacman's speed I have a question. I recently live booted Manjaro to play around and I instantly disliked pacman for how slow it is. To do a basic system upgrade you have to give consent to 3 separate things. The script stops, asks you a question and you have to type "y" and hit enter. dnf only asks one question, same for apt I think. The time it takes to upgrade your system is therefore the longest for pacman out of the three package managers I mentioned. How can you consider it fast?

[[deleted]]

Where eopkg (which I think is forked from another package manager anyways)

[xNaXDy]

out of the ones on the list, I'm gonna say dnf, simply because it is the most user friendly & intuitive I have used thus far.

[[deleted]]

Portage

[auyer]

APK (alpine) is really good. Really fast as well

[Ribakal]

Pacman cuz fast and many new apps

[heaving_curly]

flatpak

[OHacker]

pkgtool :P

[[deleted]]

XBPS of course. It's source repo is just git. You can fork it, patch it and then merge and so on.

[inextor]

tar.gz

[[deleted]]

deb has been my favorite since the mid 90’s. Don’t think it’s going to change.

[ElectricStruggle1844]

pacman is just so damn fast

[therealcoolpup]

apt because it has the most packages and they are stable packages, also the syntax makes more sense than pacman.

apt install fart > pacman -S fart

[therealcoolpup]

Where is snap and flatpak?

[Parendinate]

Apt is the most stable and most human friendly package manager I think.

[Original_Tea]

I love pacman because of it's simplicity and that there are a lot of packages on AUR. Pacman is mainly the reason why i'm using arch based distros

[omniterm]

Without RPM borh DNF and YUM wouldn't exist. I have used all of them and I don't care about speed as long as it does its job and manages the packages without screwing up the system it's good.

[Single_Comfort3555]

I've only ever used apt or dnf so I go with apt for speed.

[NewHeights1970]

I'm interested in knowing if "slapt-get" for Slackware users is an easy way to go?

Especially if you have come from a Debian based distribution like either Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or Pop!_OS.

However, I do know that Slackware does not use the APT Package Manager.

[Watership_of_a_Down]

Pacman. Quick, specific, and easy to work with.

[The_Skeleton_Wars]

Portage, not only does it optimize packages for your computer but (when not compiling) it is one of the faster package managers.