If you’ve hopped between Linux distributions as much as I have, you know that each major family of distros introduces you to a different package manager. At first, it can feel a bit daunting (apt on Debian/Ubuntu, dnf on RHEL/Fedora, pacman on Arch, and zypper on openSUSE), but these tools all serve the same purpose of installing and updating software.
After using Linux for years (across everything from Debian to Arch-based systems), I’ve grown comfortable with all of them. Even niche distros like Slackware, Gentoo, and Void. In this post, I’ll break down the major package managers, how they differ, and what it’s like to use each one. We’ll also touch on the universal package formats (Snap and Flatpak) that aim to work across distributions, and lastly mention a few niche package management systems. Let’s dive in!
Over the summer Zypper got a huge speed upgrade after decades of being one of the slowest package managers, and while Hayden James did give Zypper “the best score” (not really, (except if you assume they all got 5 in ecosystem size) all of them got 17, except Pacman that got 16), it would’ve been nice of them to mention that as I’m sure lots of people probably still have this idea of Zypper being sluggish and taking forever.
In fact, seeing as how APT is limited on simultaneous downloads, I’d wager that Zypper is actually faster than APT now. Probably faster than Nala as well.
Yes, I was fine with/accepted the “slowness” before (I love zypper) & one day just suddenly it just started “skipping” the download parts & it was a huge optimization :D.