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Add to SafariWhen comparing YUM vs Pacman, the Slant community recommends Pacman for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux package managers?” Pacman is ranked 1st while YUM is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Pacman is:
Pacman is objectively one of the fastest package managers around. This is because it's very minimalistic and it installs only prebuilt packages.
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Simple syntax
Pro Binary delta for faster transfer times
Yum supports Delta RPMs which allow transmitting only the parts of the package that have changed.
Pro Is/was the industry standard
YUM is still widely used in corporate environments.
Pro Provides pre and post install sanity checks
What might be thought of a standard feature, isn't. Thankfully RPM provides both a transaction test and a post install verification to make sure everything installs neatly.
Pro Supports multiple verification methods
Supports verification with GPG and MD5.
Pro Clean and easy to understand
Pro Supports multiple compression methods
Supports gzip, bzip2, lzma, or xz compression.
Pro Allows for complex dependency definitions
Alongside allowing dependency on a certain package, it allows depending on a library, versioned symbol, or a GAC'd Mono assembly.
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 Packaging signing keyring and mirror list
Both are also provided through packages which keeps them up to date.
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 leisure.
Pro Manages dependencies reliably
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.
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.
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.
Pro Easy to create custom repositories
Pacman makes it fairly easy and straightforward to create your own repository with signatures.
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.
Pro Zstd compression
Uses Zstd compression for fast downloads & updates.
Pro Synchronizes package lists with the master server
It allows the system to always be up to date.
Pro Supports colored output
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.
Pro Can be made to use any downloader
Allows to change its downloader from internal to any other like wget or aira2.
Pro Kernel build ordered
Pro Supports deltas
However default Arch Linux mirror servers does not provide deltas, so it is not so useful like with DNF.
Cons
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.
Con Slow (and might be fragile) dependency resolution
YUM dependency resolution is very slow. In addition to it, the people often experiencing very hard dependencies (it might be not a YUM problem).
Con Does fsync often
Like its successor, DNF, YUM does fsync too often. The result is poor YUM and system performance while YUM does its work.
Con Very slow overall
YUM is very slow - beginning with relatively slow startup, extremely slow default plugins, slow dependency resolution, and ending with slow installation of packages.
Con Poor design
YUM is written in Python 2 and people often blaming the quality of YUM's code.
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.
Con Poor Multiarch support
can not install regular foreign arch packages alongside and needs specific nade subarch packages.
Con Doesn't always clean up after itself
Pacman leaves new configuration versions around and generally doesn't handle file conflicts smoothly.
Con Naive
For example, it doesn't allow you to purge (remove package and its configuration files).
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.
Con Unintuitive syntax
Pacman has a difficult syntax and commands to remember.
Con No partial upgrades
Pacman just doesn't support partial upgrades. It has to always be system upgrade and never package upgrade.
Con Not KISS
It is not simple or does follow the UNIX philosophy instead it tries too much at the same time which results in slowness and errors.
Con Bloated
It is over complicated and bloated compared to other *NIX package managers like dpkg, rpm or pkgsrc. For example, they follow the Unix philosophy and do "one" thing well, which is to install local packages and use other frontends to configure, remote install or to search for packages/files. Pacman, however, tries to do all those tasks in one app, which adds some flaws.
Con Painfully slow
It takes ages to update the system compared to dpkg or rpm, which due its poor performance by unpacking very large packages with many files to the filesystem.
Con No parallelization
Neither downloads nor processing can be set to run in parallel.
Con You can not create pacman packages under a non-pacman distribution
For example on fedora/suse/debian/ubuntu, you can easily create rpm and deb packages, but you can not create pacman packages, which makes it uncomfortable to support arch/pacman packages.
