Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah I hadn't for ages either but have been using RHEL at work for almost a year. It's very annoying because of occasionally missing packages (e.g. `z3`), and just having to figure out different names of packages etc.

However I would have to say that `dnf` (the new `yum`) is waaay better than apt. For a start it is much much faster to install things. I don't know why apt is so slow.

But also it comes with great features to help you deal with very common and tedious Linux admin tasks, like "what package do I install to get this file my program is demanding?" (`dnf provides`) and they have some very nice features like if you run a command and it isn't installed it will offer to install it for you and then run your original command. Someone actually thought about UX for once.

Or if you run a program and it can't find a shared library, it will tell you all the missing libraries, not just the first one. It would be amazing if it also offered to install the right packages but it doesn't quite yet.

So in conclusion I'd stick with Debian given the choice but I sure wish the Apt developers would spend some time using dnf.

> However I would have to say that `dnf` (the new `yum`) is waaay better than apt. For a start it is much much faster to install things. I don't know why apt is so slow.

I (and everyone else I know of) have the opposite experience, which pretty much matches the numbers here: <https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-08-17-linux-package...>. DNF seems to be 0.1% faster than YUM, but it’s still not competitive with other package managers.

Yeah it's because its metadata update is automatic and stupidly slow and he's only installing one package so that dominates. When you're installing 100 packages it's a lot faster though.

But it is quite annoying - I wish the update were faster.

There are a couple changes coming that will help

1) zstd compressed metadata. Currently almost all repos use gzip, but zstd works better. All the software support is in place it just needs to be used, and Fedora will likely be turning out on soon.

2) dnf5 will do a better job of parallelizing metadata downloads. Currently it happens one repo at a time.

3) dnf5 will avoid downloading file lists.xml when it's not needed, which is a big help because that file tends to be the largest one

Hopefully then it will be faster than apt without any asterisks

That sounds great. Why use XML in the first place though? Strange design.

> what package do I install to get this file my program is demanding?

You can install apt-file, and then use `apt-file search`.

Ok but why isn't that just part of apt?

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