I love paru, but I think my favorite thing about it is that it isn't yay.
Back when i started using Arch Yay was mega popular so I tried it. Its great, I loved it, shouldn't be a surprise I love paru too. But Yay was always my only Go app, so I'd end up installing Golag, which is gigantic, just to use yay.
YSK/PSA: If you're on Mint, Mint's apt is not Debian's apt and while they work similarly for common use cases, they diverge pretty quickly beyond that. Both are installed by default but Mint's takes precedence.*
Case in point: I was looking for which package - specifically one that was not yet installed - contains a certain command line tool and Mint's apt search does not find it. Debian's does. **
On the other hand, Mint's apt has way more subcommands than the default one, which have been useful on occasion.
* Mint's is at /usr/local/bin/apt and Debian's is at /usr/bin/apt; The default user $PATH puts /usr/local/bin before /usr/bin.
** FWIW, the tool is/was sponge and it's in the moreutils package.
Disclaimer: while aptitude was originally designed to replicate the apt CLI interface, I have never run the search command through it. The TUI is marvelous, though.
Nowadays apt supports deleting dangling config files with apt purge "~c" so no need to have aptitude for that feature. However, aptitude why <package> is pretty handy, and if you bump into dependency problems aptitude is quite capable of suggesting valid solutions.
Dude/dudesse, what the hell is this and why have I never heard of it? Sounds really useful on the manpage, I hope I remember it next time I need it. Thanks! 😊
I need to have aptitude because the TUI is boss. Even if it had less features than apt, I'd still prefer it. It's nice to know it's ahead of the curve, though.
I wonder why apt search on ubuntu and debian must be so bad: on mint each package has a single line and an easy letter telling you if the program is installed or not. On debian/ubuntu each program takes multiple lines, are all green and the only way to distinguish installed ones is to look for an (installed) string at the end of the first line. I like Mint's apt version so much
we are all just splitting hairs and knocking each other's preferences when it is basically trivial. Like BMW and Mercedes drivers trying to one up who drives the superior German car
I can’t lie, that’s one of the reasons I moved over to CachyOS a few months back. It’s not the only reason, but it’s been my favourite distro for sure that I’ve tried. It’s the first one that really felt good to me.
It's really a great distro, I've been using it fulltime on laptop and PC for over a year. Best one I've tried so far and for some reason it's less buggy than EndeavourOS was for me. The only thing I don't like about it is the name.
Its an excerpt from pacman's configuration file, first line makes the progress bar a pacman that eats dots while downloading packages, the second line is self explanatory and the third allows to download multiple packages at the same time so there are 15 pacmans at all times while downloading.
-y only syncs the repository metadata that's needed, while -yy forces a full refresh. This is very rarely needed and requires quite a bit more bandwidth from the mirrors
I used all of them. Out of the three apt is the one I dislike the most. Dnf is half baked, but works well enough anyway. Pacman is actually very nice, I just don't use arch anymore.
Not OP. I like apt. But I switched over from redhat/fedora to Ubuntu like 15+ years ago, and I will say the rpm command offered much better options for querying package metadata. What mostly comes to mind is searching for files belonging to a package, or finding what package a file belongs to. dpkg/ apt-* can’t do that out of the box without some additional apt-* tools installed. Which is ok, but a bit extra clunky.
Dnf sits on top of rpm (formerly yum did this, formerly up2date did this) the same way apt sits on top of dpkg.
While ultimately they both provide similar general functionality (installing and updating packages) the specific command syntax and switches differ. And some commands imo are more useful than others.
Not that I dislike it, but many quality of life things are missing. One simple example is that a sensible way to manage which packages are automatically installed and not manually has been introduced only recently. Searching for dependencies of packages is quite complex. If you know the name of the executable/library file I'm not sure whether it is possible to retrieve the package who provides it.
Asides from that, it is the one package manager who gave me the most problems when something goes wrong. Not comparing to the problems that arise from arch all the time, but apt often has locking problems, incorrect resolution, impossibilities to upgrade certain packages and many many problems if you start introducing third party repositories.
It is quite usable, don't get me wrong; but I never felt all this hindrance while using dnf.
The list of upgrades being one big paragraph instead of separate lines is bad enough. I have some Debian servers but never looked if there's a flag to make it look better.
Also no history or rollback. Madison is dumb as I recall. Just kind of unintuitive and bare bones for me. Dnf (especially dnf5) suit me fine but I'm an rpm homer.
I didn't know what was dnf so I made a search and found out it replaced yum as the redhat package manager in 2013. I did not know about yum either. Last time I used a redhat-based distribution, Mandrake, the package managers were rpm and urpmi. Tempus fugit!
slow to lauch things it installed
permissions finicky
non-integration with host system’s things
It's a great way to install apps without cluttering ~/.config, ~/.local/share, etc, since each app has its own directory in ~/.var/app (unless it has write permissions somewhere else in which case it might use that), and I don't care as much about managing configuration files of specific GUI apps. I run Librewolf as a Flatpak and it launches quickly, also.
I use it to reduce bloat, because I can install an app to try it and not have to worry about cleaning it up later. Also my system uses only 1.1GiB of RAM without any apps open which is fine since I have a lot running in the background (Niri, Waybar, terminal server, XDG portals, etc.)
Only GUI apps I specifically don't use it for are Steam - because I heard bad things about Steam running as a Flatpak - and KeePassXC - because it's the one Flatpak app I couldn't make the system theme work for no matter what I did, so I used the one in the repos.
For the system settings, yeah it doesn't integrate at all if you don't configure it. I just used Flatseal (a convenient Flatpak configuration GUI) to set environment variables for all Flatpak apps, and gsettings to set themes, and now it works for most apps, except KeePassXC specifically for some reason. Understandable take on system settings.
Main reason I use it though, is that compared to my previous distro (NixOS), Void Linux's repos don't have nearly as many packages.
Then you heard wrong, those are arguably outdated information (how finicky permissions are is rather subjective). And it's only bloat if you ignore the advantages things like version-pinning offers.
You might confused the speed argument with Snap. Those are noticeably slow.
pacman is the fastest but the syntax is weird. Has the best visual, i.e. pacman loading bar. If things go wrong like a broken dependencies it doesnt provide heloful output.
Apt is the easiest to use but its output is very congested. Remember that Linus Tech Tips linux install video? The error warnings are very squashed together making it very difficult to see.
Dnf is the sweet spot imo. As default, the speed is slow but you can tweak it on the config. Outputs are clean, and if something goes wrong like a broken dependency, dnf provides very useful info to troubleshoot.
Any time I've ever used pacman to kill my system, it was my fault, usually because I either didn't read the news and missed a manual intervention, or because I didn't read the instructions before doing something. Don't play fast and loose with root.
Actually tbh, pacman has saved my installations in a chroot environment more than a few times
I think you're confused. It's really easy to use. You have to learn 3–4 command line flags instead of subcommands, but that's all that separates it from others in usage patterns.
I'm only 4 months into Linux, and apt is my comfort zone. Checking out other distros that use something else has me running away like:
pacman is very fast and handy. The (in)famous
pacman -Syuhad you system completely up to date in record time.Sometimes I miss its speed and simplicity
paru entered the chat (doesn't even need -Syu).
I love paru, but I think my favorite thing about it is that it isn't yay.
Back when i started using Arch Yay was mega popular so I tried it. Its great, I loved it, shouldn't be a surprise I love paru too. But Yay was always my only Go app, so I'd end up installing Golag, which is gigantic, just to use yay.
And here's me with my
yayzypper dupI never used opensuse but I know zypper from that one suse parody song.
You can basically take that statement and replace “apt” with “whatever the first package tool I used” and it would be true for anyone.
My first package manager was YaST, then RPM, then APT. Apt rules, and while I’ve tried some more, I’m not afraid to say APT became my comfort zone.
tell me you have never run slackware witout telling me you have never run slackware.
Not true! I used yum first and it was awful. Then switched and apt made so much more sense.
I started with Ubuntu in the days of apt-get, and boy am I happy I got to use packman now and never add another custom repository ever again
YSK/PSA: If you're on Mint, Mint's
aptis not Debian'saptand while they work similarly for common use cases, they diverge pretty quickly beyond that. Both are installed by default but Mint's takes precedence.*Case in point: I was looking for which package - specifically one that was not yet installed - contains a certain command line tool and Mint's
apt searchdoes not find it. Debian's does. **On the other hand, Mint's
apthas way more subcommands than the default one, which have been useful on occasion.* Mint's is at
/usr/local/bin/aptand Debian's is at/usr/bin/apt; The default user$PATHputs/usr/local/binbefore/usr/bin.** FWIW, the tool is/was
spongeand it's in themoreutilspackage.Just use aptitude and be happy.
Disclaimer: while aptitude was originally designed to replicate the apt CLI interface, I have never run the search command through it. The TUI is marvelous, though.
Nowadays apt supports deleting dangling config files with
apt purge "~c"so no need to have aptitude for that feature. However,aptitude why <package>is pretty handy, and if you bump into dependency problems aptitude is quite capable of suggesting valid solutions.Disclaimer: I've never used aptitude's TUI.
Dude/dudesse, what the hell is this and why have I never heard of it? Sounds really useful on the manpage, I hope I remember it next time I need it. Thanks! 😊
I need to have aptitude because the TUI is boss. Even if it had less features than apt, I'd still prefer it. It's nice to know it's ahead of the curve, though.
I wonder why apt search on ubuntu and debian must be so bad: on mint each package has a single line and an easy letter telling you if the program is installed or not. On debian/ubuntu each program takes multiple lines, are all green and the only way to distinguish installed ones is to look for an (installed) string at the end of the first line. I like Mint's apt version so much
I wonder how this is implemented in LMDE?
LMDE's system is the same as regular Mint. I've been on LMDE for a few years but was on regular before that.
dpkg -l | grep ^ii
(and then cry (this step is non-optional))
don't let this type of bantering concern you
we are all just splitting hairs and knocking each other's preferences when it is basically trivial. Like BMW and Mercedes drivers trying to one up who drives the superior German car
That’s easy Mercedes hasn’t made the superior car since the 80’s
I use eMacs by the way.
You seem to have misspelled vim.
But vim only released in 1992
For me, pacman is my comfort zone. Fast, reliable and easy to handle. But apt was it for a long time as well.
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
=
sudo dnf update -y
For most systems. If you can get apt you can get any of them.
The feds don't want you to know this but you can just put "-U" at the end of
sudo apt upgradeand it updates before upgrading.If they are suppressing this, what else aren’t they telling us
vim has a built-in autocomplete you can use by pressing ctrl-n during interactive mode.
Yup. Must be. No "-U" found in
man apt.(Is there in
man apt-getthough. And it works on both.).And it does not show up in fish's option completion options on either, either.
Near 20 years of having been using
apt-get(and later,apt), if I ever knew this, I forgot. Could have been doing just one command all this time.I should really get around to RTFM.
This gif makes me irrationally angry.
I almost used this godzilla gif to illustrate my point instead. Maybe you'll enjoy it more.
See, now why did you have to ruin these last few days of peace for me like that?
Don't panic, apt+flatpak does everything very well, if all you need is a working computer. If you need a hobby, try nix or guix
Or for the ultimate hobby to dedicate to,
cave.(Prizes for any who even know which package manager and distro that's from.)
Exactly what I feel when I look or have to interact with anything that doesn't have pacman 😅
I have to admit that I love the "pacman" pun quite a bit, which is nearly enough by itself to convince me to try it. One day. Maybe.
I can’t lie, that’s one of the reasons I moved over to CachyOS a few months back. It’s not the only reason, but it’s been my favourite distro for sure that I’ve tried. It’s the first one that really felt good to me.
It's really a great distro, I've been using it fulltime on laptop and PC for over a year. Best one I've tried so far and for some reason it's less buggy than EndeavourOS was for me. The only thing I don't like about it is the name.
I use it everyday and I still hate pacman's flags with a passion
They S is for Sync. You're syncing a package from the repos.
https://man.archlinux.org/man/pacman.8.en
But what about
pacman -SsSync search? P.S. I like pacman, just that this combination of flags is a bit weird for me personally.You wouldn't do that, its improper syntax. You'd do #pacman -Qs, Query local packages -> Search from within this set.
But I do, do that regularly. Why is it improper?
I'm just going Based on the man page I linked. s isn't listed as a subflag of S so i've never thought to use it.I just checked that again and I'm totally wrong. Disregard me I guess.
Everyone knows how to read, not everyone will feel comfortable reading the flags.
I've been trying to decipher this for a literal day what does this mean?
The best syntax is zypper's zypper in se, etc.
The thing I don't like about zypper is that it is missing functionality
the equivalent of
apt autoremovehas to be done through YaSTan equivalent for
apt purgedoes not existYou can use these abbreviations with DNF too, by the way.
Wow, cool never knew when I used it.
❌ apt update && apt upgrade
✅ pacman -Syu
apt --update upgradeemerge
is the shortest to type.
Gentoo is the fastest package manager for the user. ;D
Nix
What about LFS with make
when the
sudo nixos-rebuild switchZypper
All day every day.
Suse scares me.
Why?
It was what I started on. Before ubuntu existed. Was not scary.
The humans are chocolatey right?
And the worms are
winget.What is that?
Its an excerpt from pacman's configuration file, first line makes the progress bar a pacman that eats dots while downloading packages, the second line is self explanatory and the third allows to download multiple packages at the same time so there are 15 pacmans at all times while downloading.
Nice!
apt today, apt tomorrow, apt forever
Apt together strong
Apt my beloved Ɛ>
that's apt
Yay
yay breaks too often to be relied on for system updates
Been using it for 2 years now, never once had it break unless I messed up the command and tried to update aur packages along with system packages
pacaur
Pacman is great until you forget to delete your lock file because you interrupted an update and wonder why it isn't working.
APT is user-friendly, but a pain to automate in scripts.
the real winner is compiling from source. 😎
pacman always tells you when the lockfile is present.
Yeah but then every time I have to relook up what that means lol, and how to fix it
Portage gang represent
Yep, had to brick my system once to learn you never interrupt an upgrade...
Thanks for the weekly reminder to update.
Yup.
Got me running my pretence and mergence scripts to do all the upgrade things on my gentoo stratum.
After using dnf a bit:
dnfquite literally ignores my input.dnf searchdid not show, by default, if a matching package is already installed.yeah.. arch is not leaving me anytime soon. The option to
makepkgfrom source a few custom packages is very neat.Yeah, that's cool. Though I still prefer gentoo's USE flags (and savedconfig and patches if you like too). Even has official binhost now too.
Pacman will start the fight as soon as all packages are up to date, assuming no packages push updates in the time it takes to update (unlikely).
Why are they fighting? *shrug*
I'm guessing whoever made this uses arch btw.
My addled brain read this as apartment vs Duke Nukem Forever.
Waka waka
Eh-e eh!
I can hear the SYYU sound it makes chasing them
Don't use yy unless needed (very corner cases), the mirrors thank you :)
Tbh i never checked what this means, found it somewhere in the arch wiki when i was trying out arch
-y only syncs the repository metadata that's needed, while -yy forces a full refresh. This is very rarely needed and requires quite a bit more bandwidth from the mirrors
For me apt is faster only 3 letters
I mean... that's not incorrect, but...
Still longer, but at least just use
apt upgrade --updateSorry but muscle memory makes me write:
And I'm used to apt complaining about missing repo URL, and then I have to fix it by pointing to archive.debian.org.
-Uthat's why we have
alias pac='pacman'Or just use yay instead
i aliased
pp='pacman -S'inspired by vim's
:yyand:ddand etc...alias upd="your distro's upgrade command here"Is Yay out of date? "yay -syu" is even shorter
You don't even need to do that. You can just type
yaycan haz
emerge world;) but... I know, I know... sanity adds more options.
I used all of them. Out of the three apt is the one I dislike the most. Dnf is half baked, but works well enough anyway. Pacman is actually very nice, I just don't use arch anymore.
What do you dislike so much about apt?
Not OP. I like apt. But I switched over from redhat/fedora to Ubuntu like 15+ years ago, and I will say the rpm command offered much better options for querying package metadata. What mostly comes to mind is searching for files belonging to a package, or finding what package a file belongs to. dpkg/ apt-* can’t do that out of the box without some additional apt-* tools installed. Which is ok, but a bit extra clunky.
Isn't dnf the equivalent of apt? I don't think I've ever used rpm, but wouldn't that be more like using gdebi for deb-packages?
Dnf sits on top of rpm (formerly yum did this, formerly up2date did this) the same way apt sits on top of dpkg.
While ultimately they both provide similar general functionality (installing and updating packages) the specific command syntax and switches differ. And some commands imo are more useful than others.
Not that I dislike it, but many quality of life things are missing. One simple example is that a sensible way to manage which packages are automatically installed and not manually has been introduced only recently. Searching for dependencies of packages is quite complex. If you know the name of the executable/library file I'm not sure whether it is possible to retrieve the package who provides it. Asides from that, it is the one package manager who gave me the most problems when something goes wrong. Not comparing to the problems that arise from arch all the time, but apt often has locking problems, incorrect resolution, impossibilities to upgrade certain packages and many many problems if you start introducing third party repositories. It is quite usable, don't get me wrong; but I never felt all this hindrance while using dnf.
The list of upgrades being one big paragraph instead of separate lines is bad enough. I have some Debian servers but never looked if there's a flag to make it look better.
Also no history or rollback. Madison is dumb as I recall. Just kind of unintuitive and bare bones for me. Dnf (especially dnf5) suit me fine but I'm an rpm homer.
When and where did you last use
apt?apt upgrade's not formatted like that here for me (currently on mx). Uses colour and spaced columns.apt-get upgradeis like that still, one big paragraph.Debian 13 I want to say. I'll have to look again next time I do it.
I am just going to mention yum so that I can get downvoted. (We use it at work.)
yay
If I'm not mistaken, dnf is to yum as yay is to pacman. Edit: don't shoot me I'm relatively new to arch based distros, AUR is scary.
guixthe most laudable.
The real OG is emerge.
The best software manager ever.
IFTFY.
(And I agree. USE flags ftw.)
Dang, you are so correct.
I forgot that unlike most package managers, Portage doesn't use its name for the command.
But then again people never say 'I use Aptitude', just apt.
Some people do use
aptitudeinstead ofaptorapt-get.These are not the same.
Different ways to wrap around
dpkg.Try running just
aptitude. :) See? :) TUI.Advance Packaging Tool. It's an acronym BTW.
I didn't know what was dnf so I made a search and found out it replaced yum as the redhat package manager in 2013. I did not know about yum either. Last time I used a redhat-based distribution, Mandrake, the package managers were rpm and urpmi. Tempus fugit!
Gets even more confounding when considering PCLinuxOS, which uses apt to manage rpm packages.
I use xbps and Flatpak
Oh I so want to upvote that. Why did you have to go and ruin it by adding "and Flatpak"? n_n
Why, Flatpak is nice.
and, so i hear:
It's a great way to install apps without cluttering
~/.config,~/.local/share, etc, since each app has its own directory in~/.var/app(unless it has write permissions somewhere else in which case it might use that), and I don't care as much about managing configuration files of specific GUI apps. I run Librewolf as a Flatpak and it launches quickly, also.I use it to reduce bloat, because I can install an app to try it and not have to worry about cleaning it up later. Also my system uses only 1.1GiB of RAM without any apps open which is fine since I have a lot running in the background (Niri, Waybar, terminal server, XDG portals, etc.)
Only GUI apps I specifically don't use it for are Steam - because I heard bad things about Steam running as a Flatpak - and KeePassXC - because it's the one Flatpak app I couldn't make the system theme work for no matter what I did, so I used the one in the repos.
For the system settings, yeah it doesn't integrate at all if you don't configure it. I just used Flatseal (a convenient Flatpak configuration GUI) to set environment variables for all Flatpak apps, and
gsettingsto set themes, and now it works for most apps, except KeePassXC specifically for some reason. Understandable take on system settings.Main reason I use it though, is that compared to my previous distro (NixOS), Void Linux's repos don't have nearly as many packages.
Then you heard wrong, those are arguably outdated information (how finicky permissions are is rather subjective). And it's only bloat if you ignore the advantages things like version-pinning offers.
You might confused the speed argument with Snap. Those are noticeably slow.
Honestly as I force myself more into learning fedora, I’m really liking dnf. The history and rollback feature is super nice.
pacman is the fastest but the syntax is weird. Has the best visual, i.e. pacman loading bar. If things go wrong like a broken dependencies it doesnt provide heloful output.
Apt is the easiest to use but its output is very congested. Remember that Linus Tech Tips linux install video? The error warnings are very squashed together making it very difficult to see.
Dnf is the sweet spot imo. As default, the speed is slow but you can tweak it on the config. Outputs are clean, and if something goes wrong like a broken dependency, dnf provides very useful info to troubleshoot.
Pkgs Insert random shenanigans
It's a mànage à trois
me over here using the gui software manager because it works just fine and I can't be assed to learn the difference between package managers.
Its most likely just a front-end for one of the command line tools anyway, so you're probably still using them.
And if it's the easiest way to get what you need, then it sounds like you're using the right tool for your use case. That's a good thing.
Is Pacman still missing a proper alternatives system?
What would that be for? It's hard to search the internet for.
I think I remember from my Ubuntu days that I used it to switch JREs? Arch has something for that!
JREs, man providers, *roff, …
Arch does indeed have a special mechanism for Java, but Debian and Fedora have a general-purpose system (the same system actually)
My poor gam.
No one fears pacman unless they have to use it.
What's wrong with pacman? I love pacman!
It's never eaten your system's bootability yet?
Any time I've ever used pacman to kill my system, it was my fault, usually because I either didn't read the news and missed a manual intervention, or because I didn't read the instructions before doing something. Don't play fast and loose with root.
Actually tbh, pacman has saved my installations in a chroot environment more than a few times
I think you're confused. It's really easy to use. You have to learn 3–4 command line flags instead of subcommands, but that's all that separates it from others in usage patterns.
What I really love about telling someone their favorite package updating tool is shit. Is someone trying to tell me I'm confused.
That or both wrong and an asshole. I was trying to be charitable.
That made me laught 😭
Accurate: APT vs DNF is the real kaiju fight… and then pacman -Syu shows up like the final boss..
No contest. Apt-rpm is superior in every way.
SuSE people can sit down too. I've seen inside that mess.
Why is it superior?
Ah-ha! First appearance of a PCLinuxOS user.
... Or you're just using a confusing phrasing.
[ more ]
What is apt-rpm?
A wrapper to use apt commands for rpm packages. It's just there to help with muscle memory.