this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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unix like operating system lovers

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My favorite is pacman because it is fast af but it has really weird syntax's

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I use yay, it's pacman with AUR support. :)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

FYI: ~~yay is no longer maintained~~ (Untrue! See response here). ~~Use paru instead~~ Consider paru as an alternative option; it's written in Rust and has better version tracking for *-git packages (won't miss upgrades if the AUR version isn't tracked, won't do pointless upgrades if the AUR version changes but HEAD remains unchanged)

[–] gizmonicus 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The latest release of yay was 3 weeks ago. Where are you seeing that it's not maintained anymore?

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

Huh! I appear to have fallen victim to misinformation. I stand corrected and I apologize for not properly confirm such a strong claim before repeating it like that.

I suppose a more accurate way to put it is that yay has been slower to adopt new features (e.g.: yay#336 vs paru#260), but otherwise remains a current and well-maintained piece of software.

[–] gizmonicus 4 points 2 years ago

I was about to throw my computer out the window when you said that because I literally just implemented a bunch of ansible playbooks using yay to configure my machines and after yogurt et. al. being abandoned, I couldn't take another change. Not yet. I'll check out paru at some point though.

[–] abrasiveteapot 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Fellow paru user here - definitely a good choice.

[–] jack 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Fellow yay user here. Thank you for the advice, will check out paru!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Looks like I made a mistake! I was misinformed about yay being unmaintained. I'm sorry about the misleading comment. I personally like paru, but if you're already using yay there may not actually be any compelling reason for you to switch.

[–] jack 4 points 2 years ago

I deeply appreciate the correction, thanks for letting me know!

I'll still check out paru at some point, but now with less anxiety about the state of yay.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

came here to post this.

Also it always feels like I'm cheering for my system. :D

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Debian user here, I just use apt. Really easy to use. I don't really think about being fond of a certain package manager, if it works, it works.

[–] true_blue 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

DNF. It's slow definitely but it has a lot of really cool features, and the output looks nice.

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[–] july 6 points 2 years ago

apk is scary fast. Makes spinning up a quick Alpine chroot with e.g. Go or Rust for building with Musl take like 10 seconds.

[–] Nick 6 points 2 years ago

Pacman, indeed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I used to like portage a lot when I first tried gentoo. I was like dam I really have to build every single thing. I just want this. don't get me wrong Gentoo keeps your system maintained clean and minimal but just the time compiling got my wife angry lol

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

It can get tedious on a single machine. Once you have enough for a binhost to start making sense... Now we're talking 🤣

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

I kept hearing about a binhost. is that where you have it in a VM or something?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's some computing device (technically a smart toaster could do it) that shares the binaries over the network to other machines. Normally stuff is compiled for the lower common denominator when it comes to CPU architecture and supported features.

I have it as a VM, some people do it on bare metal. I'm trying to to have multiple CPU architectures supported by cheating a bit with BTRFS snapshots at the moment; time will tell if it works out.

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

Got it.

Never got into btrfs I see the value in it like something crashes or goes down you can go back to that snapshot and everything comes down but I just never really had issues. I distro hop also so i don't know when I hope its spontaneous. Maybe one of these days I will get back to Arch and play with it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The ability to come back is awesome, although I have never had a reason to use it.

For a distro hopper like yourself it would actually make like so much easier! Because of how subvolumes work - you can have every distro in a separate subvolume. They can share the home subvolume if you like, or not. You can have upgrades with a failsafe of sorts for the likes of Ubuntu, which, in my limited personal experience, have never ever been without issues.

Having a server subvolume to run portage in and then snapshotting it to a desktop one, applying desktop config saves some time on recompiling the big friends like gcc and llvm.

I did not understand the point of BTRFS at first as well, especially since it was slower than ext4. But since having started using it I've found that there are now scenarios that were not possible before or were incredibly complicated. Like read-only root, incremental backups over the network (yes, rsync exists, but this feels cleaner)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Thanks. I will do some research on it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

I'm using pacman with paru right now, but I have to say than installing flatpaks has been a really nice experience on my postmarket-os phone and on desktop as well. I am using Gnome Software to install and run with two clicks, feels very snappy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I like flatpak because the apps run on all distros!

[–] The_Hideous_Orgalorg 4 points 2 years ago

Portage, of course.

[–] ray 4 points 2 years ago

My favourite is pacman. I actually like the syntax. It feels very UNIX-y.

I'm a fan of the refresh (-y) and upgrade (-u) options being separate flags that can be used separately or together. I also find pacman's output to be very clean and readable.

Whenever I use apt, I find it slightly annoying that I need to invoke update and upgrade (and dist-upgrade) separately. I also find apt spits out a lot of unnecessary output, resulting in an unreadable wall of text.

I haven't used yum/dnf much, but the few times I used it I was slightly annoyed that it seems to insist on refreshing the repositories every time it runs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

pacman and apt are king. I usually go between arch and demon when I'm using Linux. I prefer arch since it's barbones

[–] Klaymore 4 points 2 years ago

Nix on NixOS - pin any version of a package you want, multiple versions of the same package, works on all Linux distros and MacOS, and with Home-Manager it can even manage your dotfiles.

[–] planish 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can it be emerge? I love calling software forth from the depths.

[–] gizmonicus 3 points 2 years ago

emerge is the command but it's called Portage, ackshually. And yes, it's the best.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I’d like to put in my 2 cents for pkgsrc

It’s not the sexiest, fastest or most full-featured but having a package manager that can bootstrap on anything even remotely smelling of Unix is awesome. And it sits cleanly next to whatever native package manager may exist.

pkgsrc drew me into NetBSD and becoming an official developer was a proud and happy moment.

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

Hey, thanks for suggesting pkgsrc! Do you have any experience using it on systems where you don't have root access, i.e. you need to install software in your home directory? Is it a good fit for such scenarios?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

pacman and that's because the syntax is perfect. If a distro doesn't use pacman I usually don't even consider using it.

[–] d4rk33 3 points 2 years ago
[–] burndown 3 points 2 years ago

I don't think any of them are very good, but DHL is by far the worst

[–] ballogh 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Ah yes, the oft-forgotten furtive GNU/NT user

[–] sorrybookbroke 3 points 2 years ago

Chocolaty is superior

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 3 points 2 years ago

My favorite is pacman (BTW, I really like the syntax), but I'm on openSUSE now so I deal with zypper, which works really well but I'm not a fan of the syntax.

[–] pax 2 points 2 years ago

homebrew, because I'm mac guy.

[–] noshit 1 points 2 years ago

xbps, it's the fastest one I've seen but the syntax is kinda weird

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I use Linux since 2004 and have a lot of experience with all kinds of different package managers. I use all these actively on different systems right now and I like them best in this order:

flatpak > apk > paru / pacman > portage > apt

Used to prefer portage over everything, but as I got older, with 2 little children, etc. I just don't want to use source-based stuff intensively any more. Nowadays, I prefer to just install my sheit and have it work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

apt or pacman. DNF is pretty slow, though.

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

I love dnf just for its search function, I literally cannot use apt to search for packages its so much worse than dnf in that regard.

[–] ReveredOxygen 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Dnf searches take so long to run though, whereas pacman is near instant. When I moved to fedora, I seriously miss the speed of pacman

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Speed is lacking, but it always gets me the results I want. I used Arch for a short time but don't remember the experience searching for packages. (I also really liked Arch's way of naming packages)

[–] roomey 1 points 2 years ago

You will all hate me but... Snaps! First time I could easily roll back a bad version of thunderbird (I use it for work -office 365) which got stuck in a oauth2 login loop. I had to roll back twice (again, single command, everything just worked) then finally an upgrade where the bug was fixed.

Don't get me wrong I've pinned versions before with apt etc, but I always end up forgetting and having to remove them afterwards.

And... The only reason I was using the thunderbird snap was cause the regular apt thunderbird had some other annoying bug.

Yep.... Snaps... (Shake my head and walk away)

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