Fink vs Mamba
Fink
finkproject.orgMamba
mamba.readthedocs.ioSide by side
| Figure | Fink | Mamba |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Package Managers | 7.5 (#72) | 8.8 (#9) |
| Platforms | The project reports work in progress support for macOS 11 through macOS 13, while its status page lists full support through macOS 10.15 and older versions with varying update availability. | Mamba runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, including ARM64 and PPC64LE; installation instructions also cover macOS Silicon. |
| Purpose | Fink ports Unix open source software to macOS and packages it as a coherent distribution. | Mamba is a fast, robust, cross-platform package manager that manages conda environments. |
Plans
In their own words
Mamba
Mamba manages conda environments across Linux, macOS, Windows, API, and self-hosted setups. It creates and activates environments, installs packages, and runs commands inside them. It works with conda packages and supports most conda commands; its parallel downloads and libsolv solver speed package resolution. The framework includes the mamba command-line interface, the libmamba C++ library, micromamba, and Python bindings. Environment creation accepts text, Conda YAML, explicit, and conda-lock YAML specifications, and micromamba can install conda-lock files directly. The repoquery command searches repositories and can display direct, recursive, and reverse dependencies. Environments are self-contained prefixes that can manage native dependencies across programming languages. Mamba documents verification for package archives and extracted files, while repository index verification remains experimental. By default, it warns and asks for confirmation before transactions run package link scripts that can perform system operations. Mamba is free, open-source software under the BSD-3-Clause license, with lockfile support.