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.
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.
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.
Pacman just does a lot less work than apt, which keeps things simpler and more straightforward.
Pacman is as close as it gets to just untar’ing the package to your system. It does have some install scripts but they do the bare minimum needed.
Comparatively, Debian does a whole lot more under the hood. It’s got a whole configuration management thing that generates config files and stuff, which is all stuff that can go wrong especially if you overwrote it. Debian just assumes apt can log into your MySQL database for example, to update your tables after updating MySQL. If any of it goes wrong, the package is considered to have failed to install and you get stuck in a weird dependency hell. Pacman does nothing and assumes nothing, its only job is to put the files in the right place. If you want it to start, you start it. If you want to run post-upgrade, you got to do it yourself.
Thus you can yank an Arch system 5 years into the future and if your configs are still valid or default, it just works. It’s technically doable with apt too but just so much more fragile. My Debian updates always fail because NGINX isn’t happy, Apache isn’t happy, MySQL isn’t happy, and that just results in apt getting real unhappy and stuck. And AFAIK there’s no easy way to gaslight it into thinking the package installed fine either.
I have absolutely zero experience on pacman, but I could argue the very same with dpkg/apt with the same arguments. The Debian kind, not the abomination Ubuntu ships with today.
It’s similarily possible (dpkg --get-selections, some sed/cut/awk wizardry to cut unnecessary stuff from the output, xargs to apt install --reinstall on that and you should be good to go, maybe there’s even a simpler way to achieve that) with Debian.
But that’s just me. I’ve been with Debian for quite a while. Potato was released 2000, but I think I got my hands on it 2001/2002 and I’ve been a happy user since. And even if I’ve worked with pretty much any major distribution (RHEL, CentOS, SuSe, Ubuntu and even Slackware back in the day) around I still prefer Debian because that’s what I know and learned over the years on how to fix things if something goes sideways.
I think the missing key there is the independent statically built binary for apt that does not depend on pretty much any part of the base system actually functioning. That’s what I couldn’t find, is there one and I just suck at Google?
I don’t think there’s one at least in official repositories. But if you’re missing libc6 one might argue that your system is not in any functional state anyways.
Wouldn’t flatpak inherently be less likely to rip the system to shreds?
you have a very limited understanding of flatpack if you think you can use it to install your init system.
Nobody said anything about the init system, though.
emerge or gtfo
Anyone looking for the best package manager needs to look only at portage/emerge and nix
I think because other distros don’t have half the issues Arch has, pacman isn’t as important in keeping the system “stable”.
But I understand why someone using Arch would be fascinated by pacman.