Linux software is installed as packages: archives that contain files plus metadata such as version, dependencies and install scripts. Two families dominate. Red Hat, Fedora, Rocky, Alma and SUSE use RPM (RPM Package Manager) packages, and Debian and Ubuntu use .deb packages. Each family has a low-level tool that works on individual package files and a high-level tool that talks to repositories and resolves dependencies. (SUSE's high-level tool is zypper, but the RPM queries are the same.)
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