When would yum be of use to an Ubuntu user?

My understanding is that yum, and the rpm system, is only useful on distributions such as Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS. I thought that Ubuntu, as a Debian based system, had no use for yum.

So I was surprised to find yum in the (universe section of) the official Ubuntu repositories.

When would yum be of use to an Ubuntu user?

Solution 1:

Yum is for RPM packages. RPM is not the preferred installation method in Ubuntu. The equivalent to Yum would be APT and dpkg. Yum is not a preferred way to update an Ubuntu system.

To install it, you can do so from USC, or from terminal:

sudo apt-get install yum

I don't think you would have a use for it, since there are equivalent Commands in Ubuntu. See the Table of Equivalent Commands

I would think that it can be used as a backup, if for some reason normal command won't work.

Solution 2:

The primary use case for yum in Ubuntu is if a third-party application has its own yum repository, and no apt repository. Then it will sometimes work to install yum, enable the vendor/project repository for that software, and install the software.