Install apt-get on openSUSE

Question

On my system, openSUSE (15.1) is installed, as is zypper packet manager, which I'm not used to. Specifically, I think it lacks a huge amount of software, that I would like to use. I did already manage to install yum and add some repositories, but there is not much more content. This question about Enterprise Linux seems somewhat related, but didn't help for my OS.

As I prefer having a packet manager like apt-get over building everything from source, I wonder if there is a way to install it here. Yast was not so useful either

What you want is not `apt-get`, it's Debian's repositories of software. My suggestion would be to talk to your (new) colleagues, they probably have similar needs to you, and have found ways to fulfill them on openSUSE. — Henrik supports the community, Dec 02 '21 at 14:12
[Cross-site related?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5357816/install-apt-get-on-linux-red-hat-server) — Cadoiz, Feb 10 '22 at 15:45

Cadoiz · Answer 1 · 2022-02-11T10:08:30.030

I only have a frustrating answer for you. You can of course always build the Debian packaging system (dpkg/apt) from source. That would be the most straight forward answer to what you're asking. But I would be doing you a huge disservice by not telling you why you shouldn't do that, so I'll do that for you as well. SUSE is built around RPMs and while I like dpkg better than RPM, I would never try to convert an RPM based distro to a debian based distro because they're architected differently. This is partly taken from here (archive), where there also is more Info.

Just for an overview (source in this archived page)):

apt(-get) is a package manager for Debian + Ubuntu + Linux Mint and all Linux Distributions build in Debian
Redhat, fedora and CentOS are using dnf/yum package manager
ArchLinux and all distributions build in arch as Manjaro, ... use pacman package manager
"Your" openSUSE uses zypper package manager, which is not so bad. You can consider searching for how to use it.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 02 '21 at 10:01

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yast2, specifically either yast2 sw_single or yast2 online_update are the best ways to handle software installation on opensuse, if you have a gui running. These allow you to list delve into the individual repositories. And yast2 repositories allows you to configure the repositories, strangely enough. yast2 is very useful, it's the best system I have ever found.

answered Dec 02 '21 at 10:01

Bib

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yast2 tells me `Qt GUI wanted but not found, falling back to ncurses.` (but `libqt4` is installed) and loads a 1980-style ugly interface. But I would prefer a cli-tool anyways. – i_want_more_edits Dec 02 '21 at 10:22

Install apt-get on openSUSE

2 Answers2