Favorite Linux Package Manager?

[Lucar]

Self Explanatory. I like apt-get because it's the first one I ever used and it comes pretty naturally to me now.

 

[mgrev]

i don't get to use linux much at all since i dont have a computer, but when i do, i use apt-get

 

[RodrigoDavy]

Pacman (the default package manager of Arch Linux) + Yaourt.

I started using Arch Linux about a month ago and was really impressed by the package manager. It's just so convenient, I've never had to search binaries or repositories, because 99% of the software you need you can find on pacman + yaourt.

I also like apt-get, but at this point going back to it would feel like going back to the Middle Ages in comparison.

EDIT: Just to emphasize, Arch Linux is a distribution that only give you two things, a package manager and documentation. But the documentation and package manager are so awesome that those two things alone made it one of the most famous Linux Distribution out there

 

[The Catboy]

apt-get is one of my personal favorites, but I also enjoy using pacman. Although I personally love any distro using RPM packaging, regardless of the package manager.

 

[AnukWolf]

Currently writing this on my Archlinux laptop, which is my absolute favourite linux dist, one reason for that definitely being the package manager, which is Pacman. Also use Yaourt which is some really pacman-like manager for the AUR, which is just as amazing.

apt-get was also my first one I ever used but I don't really like the syntax of it,
with it having like dozens of single commands for everything instead of just different parameters. But that's just some smaller issue I have with it, it's totally fine.
Pacman for me just has the "more" perfect workflow and I'm sure it has some gimmicks that I don't even know of yet xD

Also, the combination of pacman and yaourt, with Ubuntu-like systems only having a single official one, just makes the difference for me.
It's like the biggest source of packages you can have, without all the work and trouble of having to compile the packages not available in official sources all by yourself.
If you cant find one in Pacman (pacman -S <name>), just go to yaourt (yaourt -S <name>) and let it download, compile, package and install it for you automatically. Also makes updating and removal muuuch easier.

 

[Lucar]

apt-get is one of my personal favorites, but I also enjoy using pacman. Although I personally love any distro using RPM packaging, regardless of the package manager.

Currently writing this on my Archlinux laptop, which is my absolute favourite linux dist, one reason for that definitely being the package manager, which is Pacman. Also use Yaourt which is some really pacman-like manager for the AUR, which is just as amazing.

apt-get was also my first one I ever used but I don't really like the syntax of it,
with it having like dozens of single commands for everything instead of just different parameters. But that's just some smaller issue I have with it, it's totally fine.
Pacman for me just has the "more" perfect workflow and I'm sure it has some gimmicks that I don't even know of yet xD

Also, the combination of pacman and yaourt, with Ubuntu-like systems only having a single official one, just makes the difference for me.
It's like the biggest source of packages you can have, without all the work and trouble of having to compile the packages not available in official sources all by yourself.
If you cant find one in Pacman (pacman -S <name>), just go to yaourt (yaourt -S <name>) and let it download, compile, package and install it for you automatically. Also makes updating and removal muuuch easier.

Huh, never used Pacman + Yaourt. I've also never used anything other then apt-get, so...
I need a Linux Distro for a low end laptop, is Arch Linux a good pick for a Linux N00B like me who's only used Ubuntu based Distros and Debian?

 

[Duo8]

Only ever used apt, but I like the idea behind portage.

Huh, never used Pacman + Yaourt. I've also never used anything other then apt-get, so...
I need a Linux Distro for a low end laptop, is Arch Linux a good pick for a Linux N00B like me who's only used Ubuntu based Distros and Debian?

Yeah. Use it and learn it. If you just stick to "noob" distros you'll never learn.

 

[The Catboy]

Huh, never used Pacman + Yaourt. I've also never used anything other then apt-get, so...
I need a Linux Distro for a low end laptop, is Arch Linux a good pick for a Linux N00B like me who's only used Ubuntu based Distros and Debian?

Manjaro linux
https://manjaro.github.io/
Manjaro is to Arch, what Ubuntu is to Debian

 

[FAST6191]

I am not sure package manager is all that useful a concept to have a favourite in for me, and though knowing a package manager might be something I consider a bonus if I am going to be setting up a machine it I will not factor into the choice if literally anything else might matter.
I guess I do not like waiting for things to compile if I do not need them to/gain anything of great note for it (and you tend not to) and they mostly all see about as intelligent as each other, which is to say not at all really and I will probably still end up manually going through things when they screw up.

If we expanded the discussion to which distros have the best curated repos attached to them then we might have something, though completeness, license fun and games (prior to the death of flash then apt-get install flash would have been nice to have sort of thing and these days apt-get install the_nice_proprietary_graphics_drivers would do well for me), update speed (some update to the moment, others go for stability...) and more would have to be established first -- I screw up my server running a nightly build of a database program and it does not end well for me, I suffer the occasional crash running a nightly browser on my living room machine and nobody cares.

 

[RodrigoDavy]

Huh, never used Pacman + Yaourt. I've also never used anything other then apt-get, so...
I need a Linux Distro for a low end laptop, is Arch Linux a good pick for a Linux N00B like me who's only used Ubuntu based Distros and Debian?

One month ago, I hadn't use any distros other than Ubuntu and Linux Mint. You've used Debian so I guess you're more experienced than I was.

Before going on explaining a little about how Arch works by letting the user suit the SO to their specific needs, I'll give you an easy route. Ubuntu Mate should work fine in most low-end laptops, if you don't feel comfortable with Arch just yet, try Ubunt Mate.

Back to Arch... about running in a low end laptop, it really depends.
Arch doesn't come with a GUI or many pre-installed packages for that matter, so you have to make decisions about what you're going to use. The setup you make is going to define whether or not your Arch system will run fast on your laptop.

Let me give you a rather extreme example to make my point, I have a Raspberry PI which has a 700 MHz ARMv6 CPU and 256MB of RAM. I had Arch Linux installed and I wanted to choose a GUI. Since the RAM was a very limiting factor, I couldn't use something like Unity, KDE or Gnome. So I researched GUIs until I chose Mate which has many funcionalities and consumes about 40/50 MB of RAM, enough to have some spare RAM for other applications. I also had to choose other applications that are lightweight enough to not eat all the resources. I chose Dillo for a browser because it was the only one the PI managed to run smoothly.

Of course, you're laptop is probably much more powerful than my Raspberry PI so you wouldn't need to be as picky with applications. But you're gonna need to know what you're doing otherwise you might end up with a bloated SO that your laptop can't handle.

 

[Lucar]

One month ago, I hadn't use any distros other than Ubuntu and Linux Mint. You've used Debian so I guess you're more experienced than I was.

Before going on explaining a little about how Arch works by letting the user suit the SO to their specific needs, I'll give you an easy route. Ubuntu Mate should work fine in most low-end laptops, if you don't feel comfortable with Arch just yet, try Ubunt Mate.

Back to Arch... about running in a low end laptop, it really depends.
Arch doesn't come with a GUI or many pre-installed packages for that matter, so you have to make decisions about what you're going to use. The setup you make is going to define whether or not your Arch system will run fast on your laptop.

Let me give you a rather extreme example to make my point, I have a Raspberry PI which has a 700 MHz ARMv6 CPU and 256MB of RAM. I had Arch Linux installed and I wanted to choose a GUI. Since the RAM was a very limiting factor, I couldn't use something like Unity, KDE or Gnome. So I researched GUIs until I chose Mate which has many funcionalities and consumes about 40/50 MB of RAM, enough to have some spare RAM for other applications. I also had to choose other applications that are lightweight enough to not eat all the resources. I chose Dillo for a browser because it was the only one the PI managed to run smoothly.

Of course, you're laptop is probably much more powerful than my Raspberry PI so you wouldn't need to be as picky with applications. But you're gonna need to know what you're doing otherwise you might end up with a bloated SO that your laptop can't handle.

So Arch is like Lego, where you can install it then build it the way you want? That's actually pretty cool.

Also just realized that Pacman means Package Manager.

One thing that is confusing to me is that my processor is a i386, yet there is only install media for i686 and x86_64? I know i386 and i686 are both 32 bit, but if my processor says it's i386, does that mean Arch won't run on it?

 

[RodrigoDavy]

One thing that is confusing to me is that my processor is a i386, yet there is only install media for i686 and x86_64? I know i386 and i686 are both 32 bit, but if my processor says it's i386, does that mean Arch won't run on it?

I am not sure. I searched google for an answer, but found no conclusive answer. Apparently if your processor is truly i386 Arch might not run on it, but I also heard that only really old computers use i386.
Unless your laptop is from the early 90s, I'm pretty sure it must be an i686

If I were you I would give the Arch dual iso a try, if you do please tell us the results.

EDIT: I think this might help:

i386 - is the old 386/486 CPUS
i586 - Pentuim/Pro and 100% AMD Compatibles like K5 or Cyrix
i686 - Started with the P II and then the P III and AMD Athlon, Duron, XP

So unless your CPU is older than the Pentium II, I'm pretty sure you can just install the i686 or dual iso just fine

 

[Lucar]

I am not sure. I searched google for an answer, but found no conclusive answer. Apparently if your processor is truly i386 Arch might not run on it, but I also heard that only really old computers use i386.
Unless your laptop is from the early 90s, I'm pretty sure it must be an i686

If I were you I would give the Arch dual iso a try, if you do please tell us the results.

EDIT: I think this might help:



So unless your CPU is older than the Pentium II, I'm pretty sure you can just install the i686 or dual iso just fine

Ah, OK. It's a Intel M/Centrino, so I think I'll be OK. Trying out the dual iso later. :3

 

[romanaOne]

I like the Debian command line APT tools: apt-get (one-line download installs), dpkg (for messing with .debs from other distributions and probing what is already installed), and apt-cache search.

I started out using Linux in 1998 with RedHat and RPM. Back then, my network was through a phone line and it actually made sense to download a bunch of rpm packages at school and fight with them offline. rpm seemed far from robust and never handled conflicts gracefully. Since then, I've seen something called YUM and something else on RedHat called dfn. But I gave up on RedHat sometime around version 6.

After that, I went to a bookshop (around 1999) and actually bought a big fat Slackware book+cd. (Still no reliable internet here in Florida Hillbilly-ville!) The book was nice, but it seemed like Slackware's pkg(?) did nothing to protect the noob from himself: it just did whatever one told it to do, no matter how dumb.

Sometime a in 2001, a rowdy drunk guest left me a copy of SuSE (CDs and big fat book) and a consolation gift for crapping up the house. I tried it on a few systems and found it to be just as bad as RedHat, but hey it had the euro symbol. I just remember some sort of massive GUI package manager that was furchtbar-slow and I never made it to the command line (yast, was it called?)

For a while I toyed with gentoo and building everything from source and at first this seemed better. However, in the long run, I realized that portage just shifts the complexity of the package mess into environment variables (USE flags) and port files.. Also, compiling any desktop environment was starting to take almost all day even in 2003!

I've never had much luck with FreeBSD b/c my hardware is never well-supported. Never even got up and running long enough to have package problems, LOL. Guess I'll have to cherry-pick the right Thinkpad model.

Really, the Debian APT stuff in the *buntu distros is the best I've seen: I've recovered from lots of dumb moves with it and find the distribution really doesn't matter that much. Maybe APT is just the devil I know, but it seems the most robust and noob-friendly package manager.

One thing I find completely pointless about all package managers is the hunt for headers: in this age of cheap terabyte+ drives, why do we have to separate libwhatever.{deb|rpm|pkg|tgz} and libwhatever-dev.{deb|rpm|pkg|tgz}? For god sake, just install BY DEFAULT all the damn kernel source, dev tools, libs, and headers and not make the user guess which package-dev contains the missing something.h that is causing ./configure to fail.

 

[gudenau]

I use aptitude. Seems like that is the most common one here, eh?

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Currently writing this on my Archlinux laptop, which is my absolute favourite linux dist, one reason for that definitely being the package manager, which is Pacman. Also use Yaourt which is some really pacman-like manager for the AUR, which is just as amazing.

apt-get was also my first one I ever used but I don't really like the syntax of it,
with it having like dozens of single commands for everything instead of just different parameters. But that's just some smaller issue I have with it, it's totally fine.
Pacman for me just has the "more" perfect workflow and I'm sure it has some gimmicks that I don't even know of yet xD

Also, the combination of pacman and yaourt, with Ubuntu-like systems only having a single official one, just makes the difference for me.
It's like the biggest source of packages you can have, without all the work and trouble of having to compile the packages not available in official sources all by yourself.
If you cant find one in Pacman (pacman -S <name>), just go to yaourt (yaourt -S <name>) and let it download, compile, package and install it for you automatically. Also makes updating and removal muuuch easier.

Do you know about super moo powers?

 

[AnukWolf]

Do you know about super moo powers?

Well, now I know That is one nice easter egg xD

 

[Duo8]

I find it funny that they actually translated that line

"Trình APT này có năng lực của siêu bò."

 

[Monado_III]

dnf... does anyone else use fedora 22+??

 

[Duo8]

Using pacman and yaourt now. Pretty convenient.

 

[Lucar]

OK, so finally decided to get off me lazy butt and install Arch today.

CD is burning as we speak. :3

EDIT: This Disk Verification is taking forever... :|