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Add to SafariWhen comparing Pacman vs Docker, the Slant community recommends Pacman for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux package managers?” Pacman is ranked 1st while Docker is ranked 14th. 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.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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 Zstd compression
Uses Zstd compression for fast downloads & updates.
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 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 Easy to create custom repositories
Pacman makes it fairly easy and straightforward to create your own repository with signatures.
Pro Can be made to use any downloader
Allows to change its downloader from internal to any other like wget or aira2.
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 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.
Pro Allows for portable application deployment
Docker creates a single object, containing an application with its dependencies, that can be moved between any docker-enabled machines, guaranteeing the same environment for application execution.
Pro Git-like capabilities
Docker tracks changes in systems. It allows for commits and rollbacks and for quick deployment due to having to deploy only the updated code.
Pro Allows re-using components
Docker essentially allows creating boilerplate systems (a LAMP stack, for example) that can be used as a starting point on multiple projects. And you can find multiple such containers already created by people in their public registry.
Pro Automatic build
Allows automatically assembling a container from its source code.
Pro Provides easy sharing and installation of containers through a public registry
Docker allows easily pushing and pulling containers to and from their public index.docker.io registry. Additionally, dotCloud maintains a list of official repositories of the more popular containers.
Pro Application-centric
Pro Works in virtualized environments
You can set up Docker within an already virtualized environment such as a virtual machine. This allows you to run Docker on Mac and Windows, among other use-cases.
Pro Low overhead
Pro Supports a wide range of isolation tools
Docker can be used with OpenVZ, systemd-nspawn, libvirt-lxc, libvirt-sandbox, qemu/kvm, BSD Jails, Solaris Zones, and chroot.
Pro Tool ecosystem
Cons
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 Unintuitive syntax
Pacman has a difficult syntax and commands to remember.
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 No partial upgrades
Pacman just doesn't support partial upgrades. It has to always be system upgrade and never package upgrade.
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 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.
Con Large image size
Con Security concerns
Con Kernel OS fragmentation
