What are the best Linux package managers?

Each month, over 2.8 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.

score 162 · Accepted Answer

Pacman

Add Video or Image

Top Pro

Fast

Pacman is objectively one of the fastest package managers around. This is because it's very minimalistic and it installs only prebuilt packages. See More

Top Con

Doesn't always clean up after itself

Pacman leaves new configuration versions around and generally doesn't handle file conflicts smoothly. See More

cosmo's Experience

Pacman redefines what a package manager could be with super simple commands and incredibly fast runtimes. It's also amazingly extensible with wrappers like Powerpill and Yay as well as hooks before, during, and after operations. See More

Top Pro

Packaging signing keyring and mirror list

Both are also provided through packages which keeps them up to date. See More

Top Con

No parallelization

Neither downloads nor processing can be set to run in parallel. See More

Deuxis's Experience

Pacman is simplistic. It's good at only one job, fetching prebuilt packages. While this complies with the unix philosophy, in practice it severely limits Pacman's usefulness, making it more like a part of an actual package manager. See More

Top Pro

Xz compression

Uses XZ compression for fast downloads & updates. See More

Top Con

Connecting to the AUR is a pain

For example, some AUR packages, used "git://" protocol to fetch code, may get blocked under restricted network such as behind a proxy, then you need to fix its build script by yourself. See More

Electrux Redsworth's Experience

Works properly, all the time! See More

Top Pro

Synchronizes package lists with the master server

It allows the system to always be up to date. See More

Top Con

Syntax - Poorest in Class. pacman -Syu to refresh and then update your software

Top Pro

A lot of available packages in Arch User Repository

The Arch User Repository (AUR) provides more packages for Pacman than any single repository for any other distribution. No more clumsy manual installations! See More

Top Con

No official way to downgrade packages

This is related to it not supporting partial system upgrades. The very same reason prevents it from downgrading a particular package easily. Doing so can easily result in conflicts and may require a system downgrade or downgrade of multiple packages. See More

Top Pro

Advanced when you want it

Pacman does not overwrite modified configuration files. Instead, it saves a .pacnew file for it which you can later merge at your leasure See More

Top Con

No partial upgrades

Pacman just doesn't support partial upgrades. It has to always be system upgrade and never package upgrade. See More

Top Pro

Simple syntax

Pacman has a relatively simple syntax which is easy to get used to. For example: pacman -Syu to update, pacman -S foo to install etc... Commands are not long and there are not many different commands to learn by heart. See More

Top Con

Bad handling of conflicts

Relying on the entire system being updated to the exact same version, making the famed rolling-release model ironically even worse in practice than the traditional version model. See More

Top Pro

Manages dependencies reliably

Top Con

AUR packages have to be built from source

Arch Linux argues that, by storing all of their AUR (Arch User Repository) packages as source with a build script, they prevent unsecure packages from being uploaded to the repository. While this has been proven to be useful, it does make installing community packages rather slow. See More

Top Pro

Can be made to use any downloader

Allows to change its downloader from internal to any other like wget or aira2. See More

Top Pro

Simple package creation and distribution

pacman/PKGBUILD is easy to handle and yet powerful. Creating custom packages and distributing them via AUR is simpler than in other major distributions. See More

Top Pro

Simple and easy to use with custom repositories

The instructions and configurations for using a custom local or remote repositories are pretty simple and straightforward. See More

Top Pro

Easy to create custom repositories

Pacman makes it fairly easy and straightforward to create your own repository with signatures. See More

Top Pro

Pacman hooks add power and flexibility

Hooks are scripts that can run automatically before and after Pacman transactions like installation and removal of packages. For example, Pacman hooks can be used to automatically create system users and files during the installation of packages. Pacman hooks can also be used to delete configuration files and clear caches during the removal of packages. See More

Top Pro

Many wrappers available which extend functionality

Here are three examples: Powerpill, Yay, and Octopi. Powerpill extends Pacman by enabling asynchronous downloads of packages from multiple mirrors using Aria2 and Reflector. Yay extends Pacman, by enabling automatic download, compilation, and installation of packages from the AUR. Octopi extends Pacman with a GUI frontend written in Qt. See More

See All

The Best 2 of 16 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for Pacman

My Recommendation for Pacman

Fast

Doesn't always clean up after itself

Packaging signing keyring and mirror list

No parallelization

Xz compression

Connecting to the AUR is a pain

Synchronizes package lists with the master server

Syntax - Poorest in Class. pacman -Syu to refresh and then update your software

A lot of available packages in Arch User Repository

No official way to downgrade packages

Advanced when you want it

No partial upgrades

Simple syntax

Bad handling of conflicts

Manages dependencies reliably

AUR packages have to be built from source

Can be made to use any downloader

Simple package creation and distribution

Simple and easy to use with custom repositories

Easy to create custom repositories

Pacman hooks add power and flexibility

Many wrappers available which extend functionality

My Recommendation for Nix

My Recommendation for Nix

No side effects when building packages

Cannot handle filetypes that have different semantics across different versions

Can use multiple versions of the same package

Does not work well for services on non-NixOS systems

14 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for Portage

My Recommendation for Portage

Decide which dependencies to install

Very slow

Sandboxes build process

Building from source take a lot of processing time

Can install multiple versions of the same package simultaneously

High memory usage

Allows both binary and source installation

Simple overlay management

Respects customized config files

You can view a list of programs that can be installed

Implements a standard with alternate implementations

My Recommendation for DPKG family (apt, aptitude, synaptic)

My Recommendation for DPKG family (apt, aptitude, synaptic)

De facto package manager

Suboptimal dependency resolution

Supports searching for packages

Slow

Tab-completion of package names

Heavy for single-package repositories first install

Synaptic finds all dependencies reliably

Counterintuitive CLI

Excellent GUI in Synaptic Package Manager

Highly unreliable

Very complicated and redundant packaging process

Lack of sanity checks.

My Recommendation for Zypper

My Recommendation for Zypper

Fast

Manual conflict resolution required

Clean and logical

Not the default package manager for many systems

Great dependency solver

Beautiful and powerful GUI

My Recommendation for DNF

My Recommendation for DNF

Delta RPMs

Very slow

Well documented

No good front-end available

Download multiple packages simultaneously for faster downloads

Not yet at feature parity with YUM

Fast dependency resolution

User-friendly output

Powerful debug options

Reliable

DNF is a complete tool