5 package managers that work on Windows, Mac, and Linux

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There is a moment that every person who uses more than one computer eventually reaches. You sit down at a new machine, or a freshly wiped one, and you realize that the next few hours of your life will be spent visiting the same websites, clicking the same “Next” buttons, and resenting every installer that wants to add a toolbar to your browser. It does not have to go this way.

Package managers have been solving this problem on Linux for decades, but the assumption that they belong exclusively to that world has become outdated. Several package managers now work across Windows, macOS, and Linux, and the good ones let you describe what you want installed and then just get out of the way. “Cross-platform” is doing real work here, though. For some tools, that means native binaries on all three systems; for others, it means tapping into a full Linux environment on Windows via the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Let’s look at what “works on all three” actually means in practice.