Apt, YUM, Zypper, Pacman, Urpmi

[jae]

Which package manager do you prefer and why? Which is ur least favorite and why?

 

[2timer]

Sub.

 

[Jodell88]

You may have well asked what distro you like to use since a distro and its package manager go hand in hand.

I like to use pacman/makepkg. Light, portable and fast, also creating packages for software is simple affair.

I don't care for the package managers for rpms though. I find them to be slow.

 

[TSDible]

Apt

But that is really all I know right now...

 

[lxskllr]

I like Apt cause it has a lot of good tools in both cli and gui. Other than that I've only used rpm briefly, and compiled from source. Source is what it is. I wouldn't want to run a whole system that way. rpm didn't seem as polished, and I thought the tools were a bit lacking. That impression's just from brief use, and it was awhile ago, so that might not be accurate.

I forgot, I've also used boutique package managers on micro distros, but I don't have an opinion one way or the other. They did the job, and I don't expect much due to the nature of the distro.

 

[mv2devnull]

I don't prefer; I do use. I use the one that I have learned to use. It may not be perfect, but it gets the job done quite nicely. My job, so YMMV.

One thing is sure: mixing managed packages and manual source installs leads to a mess.

 

[Stone Rain]

I use Apt.

 

[jae]

You may have well asked what distro you like to use since a distro and its package manager go hand in hand.

Not necessarily; my favorite distros are Fedora and Mageia, but I prefer APT.

 

[Staples]

The likely answer you are to get is this (which would be mine).

I use Arch Linux and all I know is Pacman.

But I am sure they all are just as competent as one another so which is the best doesn't really mean much.

 

[H54]

pacman. I feel that apt is too verbose

 

[tuxberg]

Apt by nature of the fact I use it daily.

 

[bwat47]

In the past I never really had a particular package management preference. apt and yum always worked well enough for me but I can't say I was drawn to either. (Yum is rather slow, but its history and rollback features are pretty nice). I liked the raw speed of arch's pacman and its easy pkgbuild system, but I did feel it was lacking in a few other areas.

Recently I decided to give opensuse a try for the first time and years (I had very awful experiences with older versions of opensuse, 10.x I think, particularly with the package management being atrocious). After trying 12.3 I've fallen in love with opensuse's zypper package manager. IMO its the most powerful package manager currently out there. Zypper's handling of dependency resolution and installing software from multiple sources is amazing, I've never seen another package manager that handles this so well. With zypper you can use its "Vendor Change" functionality to make sure your package updates are only tied to the repos you want them to be. The dependency resolution is by far the best I've ever seen, its pretty much impossible to run into any sort of "dependency hell" with zypper. If there are any problems zypper will always present you with multiple intelligent choices to resolve them.

 

[anthero]

apt on mint because I like ppa's and know it the best. I dont like emerge and never really could get into gentoo. I like arch the best for its philosophy and prefer pacman for the default repositories but have found it impractical to deploy on anything other than a netbook for browsing and reading ebooks. I use mint/cinnamon for gaming with a dualboot windows to play swtor because wine support is utter crap

 

[H54]

apt on mint because I like ppa's and know it the best. I dont like emerge and never really could get into gentoo. I like arch the best for its philosophy and prefer pacman for the default repositories but have found it impractical to deploy on anything other than a netbook for browsing and reading ebooks. I use mint/cinnamon for gaming with a dualboot windows to play swtor because wine support is utter crap

Arch is impractical to deploy on anything other than a netbook? I'm curious as to why you would say that/

 

[anthero]

Arch is impractical to deploy on anything other than a netbook? I'm curious as to why you would say that/

I tend to reinstall quite frequently because im a neat-freak when it comes to my operating systems and I am always trying out different wm's and login managers. Arch is quick to use but takes the longest to get up and running and I dont usually save my scripts. Manjaro is great for my purposes but vanilla arch just takes too much time. but thats just, like, my opinion, man. I also dualboot my main laptop with optimus for gaming and dont have a rig anymore since the mobo died. My netbook is the only device I have that is 100% dedicated to linux. I have arch on it with dwm, slim and use calibre to read ebooks which works fine. For my purposes I just find it impractical to use on my other devices. (using mint 15 cinnamon on the lappy with no complaints)

 

[poofyhairguy]

I like apt best because it has the most repositories. That is all that matters.