Installing software and packages

In Linux you rarely install programs by downloading a file from a website. Software lives in repositories, servers run by your distribution, and you install it from there with one command. The package manager does the work: it knows what is already installed, pulls in the dependencies, and can remove all of it cleanly.

The manager depends on the distribution family. On Debian and Ubuntu it is apt, on Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS it is dnf. The commands differ, the logic is the same. Below they come in pairs: first the apt command, then its dnf counterpart.

Before installing, refresh the list of available packages. apt keeps a local cache of what the repositories hold, and without an update it may n