Managing software packages

Each distribution has its own package managers. There are two types of package managers for each distribution, one for low-level and one for high-level package management. For an RPM-based distribution such as CentOS or Fedora, the low-level tool is the rpm command, and the high-level tools are the yum and dnf commands. For openSUSE, another major RPM-based distribution, the low-level tool is the same rpm command, and for high-level tools, there is the zypper command. For DEB-based distributions, the low-level command is dpkg and the high-level command is apt (or the now deprecated apt-get).

What is the difference between low-level and high-level package managers in Linux? The low-level package managers are responsible for the backend of any package manipulation, and are capable of unpacking packages, running scripts, and installing apps. The high-end managers are responsible for dependency resolution, installing and downloading packages (and groups of...