There are those who say that Slackware Linux doesn’t really have a package manager. BAH! I say. It has two package management systems, actually.

aptitude is a featureful package manager for Debian GNU/Linux systems, based on the renowned apt package management infrastructure. aptitude provides the functionality of dselect and apt-get, as well as many additional features not found in either program.

Muon Package Management Suite is the package management application that will replace Kubuntu’s package manager when Kubuntu 11.10 is released next month. It is designed for Debian-based systems, so it could be used on similar distributions, not just on Kubuntu. In fact, it is included in the default repository of Linux Mint 11.

Fedora's Pirut is a useful tool for basic software installation and package searches. However, if you really want to take control of package management, you need to get back to basics with yum. Just as, on Debian systems, dpkg is the back end underlying apt-get and graphical tools such as Synaptic, so on RPM systems, yum is the hidden power behind Pirut and the Pup updater.

openSUSE 10.3 is set to contain a new, significantly improved and more mature package management stack by default. ZMD, the package management component causing problems in SUSE Linux 10.1 and to a lesser extent in openSUSE 10.2, has been completely removed and is now replaced by the new libzypp and its tools.

Different GNU/Linux distributions provide incompatible systems for package management, and to date no one has quite figured out a foolproof way to get the best of them all.

Package management in OpenSUSE in recent years has had its share of challenges. In OpenSUSE 10.1, the package management was an epic trainwreck. Package management in OpenSUSE 10.3 is as good as that was bad. There are various types of speed improvements. Some of them huge. There is some caching of the repository package info. Progress bars so the user knows what’s going on.

What’s the single biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry? It’s an interesting question, and one that in my opinion has a very simple answer: Package management—or, more specifically, the ability to install and upgrade software over the network in a seamlessly integrated fashion—along with the distributed development model package management enabled.

Adept is the graphical package management program included with Kubuntu, which is also available for Debian and other Linux distributions that use the apt package management system.