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Package managers on OS X, Windows and Linux

What is a package manager?

Installing software is awful. You have to do what, like ten thousand steps?

  1. Painstakingly search for something on the internet
  2. Move your mouse around, click links
  3. Figure out which version of the software you want
  4. Somehow convince it to run on your computer

And probably like ten or twenty other steps. It’s terrible!

Package managers solve that. You just type things on the command line like a hacker, and all of your problems are solved. It’s great!

OS X

There’s really only one package manager on OS X, it’s called Homebrew. You’ll install a lot of things with it, by running brew install blah blah blah.

Over time OS X has changed a lot, and Homebrew has to do little dances to make sure it works successfully in each version of OS X. As you upgrade, you might need to reinstall homebrew or run commands like brew doctor in order to repair issues as a result of upgrades.

So don’t stress if you run into issues: it’s totally normal!

Windows

Windows has two, one called Chocolatey and one called Scoop. For some reason package managers on Windows aren’t terribly popular, and I don’t use Windows, so unfortunately I’m not that familiar with them.

If you’re curious, though, you should totally give one of them a shot!

Linux

Linux is actually a ton of different related operating systems, and since they’re all somewhat different they have a handful of package managers. apt is a big one, as is deb. They all work similarly to the other ones on Windows and OS X!

If you end up trying to run fancy software on servers or Google Colab, you’ll probably use apt to install software that doesn’t already come pre-installed.

An example

For example, maybe you want to install ffmpeg to edit videos from the command line. Instead of screwing around on their site to figure out how to install it, you can just use your package manager!

Install ffmpeg on Windows

choco install ffmpeg

Install ffmpeg on OS X

brew install ffmpeg

Install ffmepg on Linux (or Google Colab)

apt install ffmpeg

In summary

They’re a delight!

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