Package manager
termIT supportprogramming
The system that installs, upgrades and removes software while tracking dependencies, file ownership and integrity - apt and dpkg on Debian lineages, dnf and rpm on Red Hat and SUSE, pacman on Arch, apk on Alpine, portage on Gentoo.
It is the component you interact with most and the one that most defines a distribution's character. The design questions are the same everywhere and answered differently: does it resolve dependencies automatically, does it verify signatures, can it roll back, what happens when two packages want incompatible versions of the same library. Container images and language-level managers layered on top have not removed the problem - they have multiplied the number of places it has to be solved.
Also known as: apt, dnf, pacman, zypper, apk, portage