DPKG (Debian Package Manager) vs Pacman

Due the popularity of Ubuntu, Debian and Linux Mint it is almost certain that you find the package you want as a pre-built deb package.

DKPG has one of the best multiarch support you can easily add new architectures with dpkg --add-architecture $ARCH to install foreign architectures.

DPKG and it frontends follow strictly the UNIX philosophy that one package should do one thing well.

eg:

Dpkg: does simple package management
APT and aptitude : adds repository and dependency tracking
debconf: does configuration
synaptic: allows mouse interaction to all apt/aptitude options

DPKG isn't as bloated as other package managers since it is only made for local package management.

There are plenty of helpers to easily create packages.
You just need to create 5 files: source/format, compat, rules, control & changelog and run dpkg-buildpackage.

Deb packages are simple ar archives with additional tar, lzma, bzip, gzip support.

You can use apt, aptitude, cupt, debdelta or apt-build on the terminal.

It is possible to interact/ask questions to all pre and post install scripts. This makes it possibe to add questions for package configuration or to display EULA/License screens that have to be accepted before installation.

This makes maintenance and support easy.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Uses Zstd compression for fast downloads & updates.

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.

It allows the system to always be up to date.

And looks cleaner and nicer with such thing enabled. Simply find and uncomment "Color" option in /etc/pacman.conf or add it yourself if it doesn't exists.

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

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

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

However default Arch Linux mirror servers does not provide deltas, so it is not so useful like with DNF.