One of the strongest points of Linux is the package management. In 2025, the world of Linux package management is very varied, with several options available, each with their advantages and trade-offs over the others.

One of the strongest points of Linux is the package management. In 2025, the world of Linux package management is very varied, with several options available, each with their advantages and trade-offs over the others.

  • @LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
    30•6 days ago

    pacman is the best and I’ll stubbornly refuse to entertain any other opinion. It’s in my experience the least likely to just randomly rip the system to shreds. I don’t know if it has more through prechecks or what bit I’ve had debian and Fedora (apt and dnf) rip the system asunder trying to jump multiple major versions in an update of a system that hadn’t been online in a long time.

    I don’t care if jumping multiple releases at once “isn’t supported” it shouldn’t be that frail and arch will happily update something many years behind as long as you update the keyring.

    Even in the event your system somehow does get hosed you can fix almost everything by just chrooting in, grabbing the static pacman binary, and running “pacman -Qqn | pacman -S -” I’ve recovered systems that had the entire /bin wiped (lol oops moment with a script) and as far as i know apt and dnf have no equivalent easy redo all.

    • Mike
      1•5 days ago

      I think because other distros don’t have half the issues Arch has, pacman isn’t as important in keeping the system “stable”.

      But I understand why someone using Arch would be fascinated by pacman.

      • @Kajika@lemmy.ml
        -7•5 days ago

        you have a very limited understanding of flatpack if you think you can use it to install your init system.

        • Fonzie!
          4•5 days ago

          Nobody said anything about the init system, though.