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Native Linux packages, not sandboxes

By pqwu…mgju August 26, 2026
DNF5 and pacman the way the distros document them. Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage are not the default.

I am Elsa Goldstein. I run a Fedora host with dnf5. When I sit on Arch, I use pacman against the official repositories first. I do not install Flatpak, Snap, or AppImage when a native package exists.

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Fedora: DNF5 is the package manager

The man page is man 8 dnf5. Upstream: https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf5/

dnf5 search cloudflared
dnf5 info cloudflared
sudo dnf5 install cloudflared
sudo dnf5 upgrade
sudo dnf5 remove cloudflared

Arch: official repositories, then stop and think

Arch’s own page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Official_repositories Packages in core, extra, and optionally multilib are what pacman is for. Usage: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman and https://man.archlinux.org/man/pacman.8

sudo pacman -Syu cloudflared

The wiki is explicit: partial upgrades are unsupported. Do not run pacman -Sy packagename instead of pacman -Syu packagename.

Arch User Repository is second, and it is not pacman

If the official repositories do not have the package, the next documented path is the https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository AUR packages are user-produced PKGBUILDs. They are unofficial and not thoroughly vetted.

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/package_name.git
cd package_name
less PKGBUILD
makepkg -si

What I refuse

Flatpak — a sandboxed app runtime with its own repositories. Fine as a product. Not how I install system tools on a host I operate.

Snap — Canonical’s confined packages. A second store, a second confinement, a second copy of libraries.

AppImage — a portable binary. Useful for a one-off demo. It is not a package manager and it does not participate in dnf5 upgrade or pacman -Syu.

If the vendor ships only a Flatpak, I look for a native package, an official tarball, or I do not run it on the production host.

#linux #pacman #dnf5 #packaging
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