When the Apple App Store came out, one of the features it touted was a central place to buy and install applications. You could download all your applications from one place, and when they were out of date, you could upgrade them from one place. Indeed, this is a useful feature (leaving aside discussions of the economics of such stores).

Indeed, this is a feature that users of the command line had for a long time. For command line terminals, these app stores are usually called package managers. They’re not called app stores, because the applications are free.

A package manager is a convenient way to install and update new software. Often the software you can get from a package manager runs on the command line, but you can also install some GUI applications as well.

If you’re on a computer running Linux, you already have a package manager built in. For example, if you’re on…

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