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What are repositories?

If your new to Linux you would of most probably heard of the word ‘Repositories’ and wondered what exactly are ‘Repositories’. Taken from the singular word of ‘Repository’ meaning a place where things may be put for safekeeping. Repositories is the archive storage of software.

Linux and the Open Source community uses repositories to allow software to be found much easier and kept central. So that users know where to come back or know where to download an updated version. Imagine if you had to go looking for a particular piece of software in different locations, each time a new update for that software came out. It’s just painful even thinking about it.

It’s also used as a way of safe guarding software. Because the software are generally open source. It is safe to presume that there could be lots of different versions, going around the internet of a particular software. Some versions which may be unsafe to use or used to harm your system.

So in a way respositories is used by you, the user to have a safe and trusted place to find software for your system.

Just note that you will most probably find the name of repositiories are named after the package manager used. Such as Fedora/Redhat being called ‘Yum Repositories’ being for the repositories that work with the package manger Yum. Ubuntu being ‘Apt Repositories’ for those repositories used for package manager Apt. Since you can’t use Apt packages on Yum and vice versa.

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