Pacman

Installing, patching, and removing software packages on Linux machines is one of the common tasks every sysadmin has to do. Here is how to get started with Linux package management in Linux Red Hat-based distributions (distros). Package management is a method of installing, updating, removing, and keeping track of software updates from specific repositories (repos) in the Linux system. Linux distros often use different package management tools. Red Hat-based distros use RPM (RPM Package Manager) and YUM/DNF (Yellow Dog Updater, Modified/Dandified YUM). YUM is the primary package management tool for installing, updating, removing and managing software packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. YUM performs dependency resolution when installing, updating, and removing software packages. YUM can manage packages from installed repositories in the system or from .rpm packages. There are many options and commands available to use with YUM.

Aptitude is an Ncurses and command-line based front-end to numerous Apt libraries, which are also used by Apt, the default Debian package manager. Aptitude is text-based and run from a terminal. A mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner. Mark packages as "automatically installed" or "manually installed" so that packages can be auto-removed when no longer required (feature available in Apt, too, since quite a few Debian releases). Preview of actions about to be taken with different colors marking different actions. The ability to interactively retrieve and display the Debian changelog of all available official packages. Score-based dependency resolver which is more suitable for interactive dependency resolution with additional hints from the user like "I don't want that part of the solution but keep that other part of the solution for your next try". Apt's dependency resolver on the other hand is optimized for good "one-shot" solutions.