Which extra package manager for cli applications? brew, nix, others, none?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/linuxquestions

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  • Ansible

    Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.

  • Well, I'm using ansible to install/update stuff, but no doubt it will use the github API behind the scenes

  • Home Manager using Nix

    Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]

  • Linuxbrew is okay, but Nix is better. Nixpkgs (the Nix package repo) is the biggest software repo, has most of the latest versions. Nix is usable on Linux, MacOS and Windows WSL2 in the same way. Nix's reproducible and declarative build system allows something like home-manager, which is a declarative management system for apps and dotfiles, also running on Linux, Mac and WSL2. Whatever you configured on one system can be used on another system with another OS pretty easily.

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    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • topgrade

    Discontinued Upgrade everything

  • If you cannot avoid mixing package sources, then maybe topgrade would be useful to you. It leverages all package managers it can find on your system to upgrade all available packages. It works with apt, dnf, zypper, pacman, linuxbrew, nix, pkgsrc, and everything else you can imagine.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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