If you’ve hopped between Linux distributions as much as I have, you know that each major family of distros introduces you to a different package manager. At first, it can feel a bit daunting (apt on Debian/Ubuntu, dnf on RHEL/Fedora, pacman on Arch, and zypper on openSUSE), but these tools all serve the same purpose of installing and updating software.
After using Linux for years (across everything from Debian to Arch-based systems), I’ve grown comfortable with all of them. Even niche distros like Slackware, Gentoo, and Void. In this post, I’ll break down the major package managers, how they differ, and what it’s like to use each one. We’ll also touch on the universal package formats (Snap and Flatpak) that aim to work across distributions, and lastly mention a few niche package management systems. Let’s dive in!
Ah, so you’ve scripted a whole bunch of stuff with YUM. Then you automatically have the downside that switching over could incur hours of work.
As much as the software developer in me wants to encourage you to use DNF (or an abstraction like
pkcon) for newer scripts, in case they want to remove YUM one day, I get not wanting to deal with two separate tools.In my head, switching over was trivial, i.e. just typing D, N, F instead of Y, U, M, because that was my experience when I switched over way back when I was still a freshly hatched penguin.
Yes, exactly. The company I work for has lots of yum scripting. I don’t hate dnf, its just not the interface I’ve used at work.