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Sips' @slrpnk.net

10mo ago

What is the most visually pleasing package manager (in terminal)?

70 comments

ArchLinux's pacman with ILoveCandy option enabled.
- Ouu, you have me intrigued! Would you mind sharing a screenshot of what that would look like? Never tried pacman, nor heard of ILoveCandy.
  
  The "C" in the progress bar is alternating between "c" and "C" to give the impression of munching.
  
  There's a video showing the difference.

Nala (an apt frontend) is the best I've seen so far
- I second nala, it's pretty enough, text mode of course.

Dnf is nice, rpm-ostree not so much.
Nala is the best by far.
Cargo is also nice.
- Yeah seriously, I was surprised at how plain and illegible rpm-ostree felt in comparison to dnf, I really wish they put a little color or some extra separation just to make it feel less cramped and give people more glanceable info.
  
  I mean someone can create a PR, would likely be highly appreciated.

Pacman ofc
- I use apt-get, I don't care about how "pleasing" the package manager is, I just want it to do its job and get off the way.. But pacman.. I don't know why, but it's so beautiful, charming and cute, how do they do it?
  
  exactly. They use c and C (uppercase) alternatively, making it look like pacman is eating. hence the beautiful, charming, and cute progress indicator
  btw dont think im crazy but ive set max parallel downloads to 200 and when i do a system update, damn that looks so good.
  
  I don't care how visually pleasing it is either, but I often find apt(-get) difficult to read.
  For example, a simple thing that zypper does, is that when listing the packages to be installed, it colors the first letter of each package, which makes it a lot easier to scan through the packages.

I really like emerge/portage, even w/out the "candy" feature enabled. Great color highlighting, and verbose messages about any config change(s) needed.
- Portage remains to this day my favorite cli. It's nice to look at and provides all the info I want.
  It's the one thing I miss from gentoo...
  
  Why miss it? It is still there.
- Ohh it's been a long time since I last used gentoo! I remember I used to love the green/blue (I hope my memory isn't failing me) combination everywhere </3.
  I stopped using it because building the updates on multiple machines was becoming a pain and had a couple of drives fail, but those were good times!
- i think you can filter this too. using stderr

Nix with nix-output-monitor (nom). https://github.com/maralorn/nix-output-monitor

It shows the tree of packages to download and to build. It shortens the tree in realtime when packages have finished downloading/building and lengthens the tree when it finds more packages it needs to handle. Very fun and satisfying.
I haven't seen this in other package managers.
- Very neat, thanks for sharing!

Debian made me to only love apt and dpkg.
- Omg apt is like the worst UI there is.
  Have a look at nala! It needs some depencies but is a huge upgrade
  
  The worst UI?
  Clearly you've never used zypper dup
  
  Ah ah i will one day.
  I clearly agree, apt is ugly and even synaptic making it better. But like i said, while ago when I used synaptic I did break my packages and I got to use dpkg and apt, to repair.
  Since, I guess, I'm on a PTSD about it and now just use apt or dpkg, when using a Debian or Debian based system.
  But I will listen to you, and for sure will give it a try
  
  apt is easy to use and read. I haven't dreamed of searching for a shiny replacement because there's no problem to solve.

Nala

Portage

portage is pretty when i dont mess up my USE flags
- @Sunny @minamoog It'd be hard to argue for anything against #portage! The only time it's not pleasing to look at is when it's littered with [ B ] markers. 😆

Either flatpak or NixOs for me.
Flatpak is just light and doesn't flood the user with 720710 lines just to say "installing Firefox"
NixOs just straight up has nothing to show.
- Fair enough, visually pleasing is subjective, after all. Simplicity can be the best sometimes :=)

I really like the simplicity and formatting of stock pacman. It's not super colorful but it's fast and gives you all of the info you need. yay (or paru if you're a hipster) is the icing on top.
- I cannot wait to tell my kids I am a hipster

Package managers don't have visuals. What do apt (dpkg) and rpm look like?
- Apologies, I meant via the terminal - have edited the title.
- Synaptic?

pacman with ILoveCandy

pikaur? I love all the colors, especially the bit where it highlights the differences in major/minor version numbers, so it immediately catches your eye (so you can track major package upgrades). I also like that it should which packages are being pulled in as new dependencies.

Package managers are for chumps. Build everything from source and track where you installed it in a single master text file.
- You joke, but you should look up Guix
  
  The key is to do it manually. Reject modernity. Embrace reinvention of not just the wheel.
- single master text file
  Sounds like something you are using to manage your packages to me...
  
  Nah, the trick is to, at random, leave a package out of the text file so the system isn't truly managed and all is chaos!

Yay

If pipx could be called a package manager it would be my most visually pleasing choice. See the video here : https://pipx.pypa.io/stable/
- I detest the node ecosystem, but I do love watching NPM build packages

I like xbps and flatpak

I don't really know how "visually pleasing" you can get with a terminal package manager tbh. I just have colors and ILoveCandy enabled in pacman and that's more than enough for me, looks pretty to me.

Aptitude

I still love aptitude TUI even though I don't use Debian anymore.
Next is dnf because it's clear with obvious subcommands.

not exactly the package manager itself, but I have a command that runs whenever I rebuild my NixOS system that shows a nicely formatted list of every added, modified, and removed package.

xbps

Yast2GUI- GTK Software Manager (zypper backend). Click the checkboxes to install, click to set update, delete or lock/hold status. Manually select a package version with radio buttons. Review files included. Read change notes Apply button.

70 comments