Linux

53358 readers

517 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

267

The wonderful world of Linux package managers (thelibre.news)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

61 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 day ago (17 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Wouldn't flatpak inherently be less likely to rip the system to shreds?

load more comments (14 replies)