In my opinion, zypper has really closed the gap to apt and there is no reason to be ashamed of using an RPM-based distribution these days. Apt completely hid this problem for DEB packages because all packages got installed from the same source. RPM also suffered from sites like rpmfind where you would find 10+ incompatible packages for different distributions. The final installation of each single package is handed over to the low-level tools.įor a long time, apt-get has been superior in processing the enormous amount of metadata really fast while yum would take ages to do it.

These tools download repositories, track all metadata and automate the downloading of dependencies. On top of these tools, there is repository management in the form of apt. Both dpkg -i and rpm -i have no way of figuring out how to install dependencies, except if they happen to be specified on the command line. They are both equally arcane, have hardcoded install paths (yuck!) and only differ in subtle details. The RPM and DEB formats are both just archive files, with some metadata attached to them. The real comparison is dpkg vs rpm and aptitude/ apt-* vs zypper/ yum.įrom a user's point of view, there isn't much of a difference in these tools. This however has nothing to do with the DEB file format. A lot of people compare installing software with apt-get to rpm -i, and therefore say DEB better.

Debian package manager