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Comment by homebrewer | Hacker News Reader

This is a very outdated view. dnf runs circles around apt. Try it out, or at least find man pages on the ole 'net and see what it can do.

Probably the thing I like the most is transactional installation (or upgrades/downgrades/removals) of packages with proper structured history of all package operations (not just a bunch of log records which you have to parse yourself), and the ability to revert any of those transactions with a single command.

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I had the same experience as the OP in the beginning of the century. I've built a lot of RPM packages back then and it was clear that system of dependencies built into RPM format itself (not apt or dnf, this is dpkg level in terms of Debian) was poorly thought out and clearly insufficient for any complex system.

I've also migrated to Debian and it felt like a huge step forward.

I'm on Arch now, BTW.

The equivalent of RPM on Debian is the .deb package format. The equivalent of apt is dbf (or yum before it or up2date before that).

Red Hat is just old enough to exist before package managers existed on Linux. It was not there at first on Debian either.

Slackware still has not package manager really.

Possibly I'm just more used to apt (though fedora was my first linux), but I've found apt has better interfaces for what I'm trying to do (e.g. querying the state of the system and ensuring consistency across machines), and I've not found an equivalent to aptitude for dnf.

Side-note, the other difference I've noticed is Debian (and presumably its derivatives) has better defaults (and debconf) for packages, so whereas stock config would work on Debian, on Rocky I have to change config files, install missing packages etc.

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