Slant community chat on Discourse| 15 Recommended Products | Recommendations | Price | Last Updated |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 Pacman· · · | 106 | 7 | – | Jul 27, 2017 |
| #2 DPKG family (apt, aptitude, synaptic)· · · | 61 | 10 | – | Jun 17, 2017 |
| #3 Nix· · · | 19 | 0 | – | Jun 22, 2017 |
| #4 RPM Family (yum)· · · | 17 | 7 | – | Jul 19, 2017 |
| #5 Zypper· · · | 10 | 2 | – | Jul 16, 2017 |
| #6 Portage· · · | 16 | 4 | – | Apr 22, 2017 |
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.
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!
Pro Packaging signing keyring and mirror list
Both are also provided through packages which keeps them up to date.
Con Doesn't always clean up after itself
Pacman's simplicity isn't for the typical windows-level computer user because it leaves new configuration versions around and generally doesn't handle file conflicts smoothly.
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.
Con No parallelization
Neither downloads nor processing can be set to run in parallel.
Pro De facto package manager
One of the biggest pluses of APT is the vast majority of software applications available for it. It's often referred as the 'de facto package manager' because most websites that offer software automatically package them in Deb format.
Pro Supports searching for packages
If you are not sure about the name of the package you are looking to install, you can easily search for it using the search function provided by the apt tools: apt-cache search $search_term
Con Suboptimal dependency resolution
Apt has only a rather simple heuristic based resolver that can result in users getting package blockages when putting individual packages on hold.
Con Counterintuitive CLI
For installing and removing you have "apt-get", for searching "apt-cache", for listing "dpkg". "dpkg" uses only switches whereas "apt-*" also commands, ... At least there is this "aptitude" frontend, but that's not a standard tool.
Pro Can use multiple versions of the same package
Because of the functional approach it takes, Nix makes it easy for systems to use multiple versions of the same package simultaneously, and ensure that updating or removing a package can't break other packages.
Pro No side effects when building packages
Nix is a purely functional package management system. This means that the act of building a package does not have side effects, such as destructively updating or deleting files that may be used by other packages.
Con Cannot handle filetypes that have different semantics across different versions
While the functional approach that Nix takes is great for sandboxing binary artifacts of packages, it seriously lacks any power in handling configuration files or user data. It's difficult to upgrade and downgrade files where semantics and syntax can change between versions. Especially in Debi...
Con Does not work well for services on non-NixOS systems
When using Nix with anything other than NixOS you can run into difficulties with trying to start up services. For example, you can install docker with Nix, but it won't integrate with the host system's systemd leaving you to handcraft awkward workarounds in order to start the background se...
Pro Binary delta for faster transfer times
Yum supports delta-rpms which allow transmitting only the parts of the package that have changed.
Pro Avoids dependency hell
All the metadata for installed software is stored into a XML file. This is used to avoid conflicting dependencies among packages. What's more, YUM also automatically syncs remote metadata to the local client in order to avoid failures if a command is not run at the correct interval.
Con Can be very slow to download headers if not on broadband
Yum can be much slower than other package managers if the internet speed is not at least average to high.
Pro Great dependency solver
Zypper's dependency solver is built on top of SAT solver which is one of the best package dependency solvers available for Linux.
Pro Fast
Zypper uses a SAT solver for dependency solving issues and this helps with increasing Zypper's speed considerably.
Con Not the default package manager for many systems
Zypper is still relatively new. As such, it's not available as the default package manager in many systems.
Pro Decide which dependencies to install
WIth portage you can decide and customize which dependencies to install through some thing called USE flags. These are keywords that when defined, will tell Portage that you want support for the chosen keyword.
Pro Sandboxes build process
Portage uses a sandbox as a safety measure during build processes. This is done to ensure that no packages accidentally write outside a 'safe' location.
Con Very slow
Dependency resolution is very slow and single-threaded, so usually you will see one of your cores running like crazy for over a minute
Con High memory usage
Usually takes between 400-800MB of RSS (no problem to get over 1GB), so it's nothing for an old hardware.
Pro Great and complete search
On other options it can be difficult to find the addons or dependencies . You will always find them in Synaptic.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
Pro Delta RPMs
Binary diffs for smaller downloads
Pro Fast dependency resolution
DNF uses a SAT solver for dependency resolution. This brings even more speed and avoids dependency hell.
Con Not yet at feature parity with YUM
As DNF is the successor to YUM, it still has a lot of features that are in YUM but that are missing here. Things like skipping broken package during install, debug, verbose output, enable repo or exclude packages during install have little to no support in DNF.
Pro Very fast and high QA
You can tweak command linea to enable and set the multifetch of packages. Support deltas and since hereditate mostly the packages of Portage, with along all the QA test results in a high QA
Know any negative aspects of this option?
Pro Large comunity of package maintainers at conda-forge
https://conda-forge.github.io/
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Pro Reproducable enviroments
Because of the high level of isolation and the image-based build system, you can move Docker containers between machines effortlessly. With fleetctl and CoreOS you can even do this automatically.
Pro Composability
Applications can be combined by linking ports on a virtual network.
Con Heavy
Images that aren't optimized to have a small base (like Alpine) can often be 100MB/+ and for running lightweight utilities the startup time of a Docker image may not make sense.
Pro Cross-platform, yet a native GNOME application
Looks great and works intuitively, regardless of which distribution you use.
Pro Shows application screenshots
Lets you see what an app looks like before installing it.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
Pro No side effects when building packages
Guix is a purely functional package management system. This means that the act of building a package does not have side effects, such as destructively updating or deleting files that may be used by other packages.
Con Cannot handle filetypes that have different semantics across different versions
While the functional approach that Guix takes is great for sandboxing binary artifacts of packages, it seriously lacks any power in handling configuration files or user data. It's difficult to upgrade and downgrade files where semantics and syntax can change between versions. Especially in Deb...
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