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by doublepg23·5y ago·view on hn ↗
Package managers are one of the main things that define a distro. The big split is between packaging formats (DEB and RPM [0]) and then there are package managers for that for that (apt* for DEBs and yum, dnf, zypper etc. for RPMs [1]). You could run a foreign package manager on any distro, there even exist ones for that purpose [2], but it's ostensibly considered a defining feature for a distro.

[0] There are more of course, but those are the big two.

[1] I'm really only familiar with the Debian/Ubuntu space (Deb)

[2] See flatpak, snap, and nix/guix. Also some distros like Bedrock Linux let you have completely foreign environments mixing together.