In One Fell Swoop

Topgrade detects all the package managers installed on a system and executes them one by one at the command line.

- Ferdinand Thommes

The times when the preferred source for an application was a distribution's own archives are definitely over for the majority of users today. In addition to third-party repositories, Flatpaks, AppImages, and snaps, the average user's filesystem also hosts PIP (Python), Cargo (Rust), npm (Node.js), or Homebrew (macOS) based installations. All of these installations bypass the operating system's update mechanisms, forcing you to update them separately.

One way out of this uncomfortable situation is the Topgrade package manager. Topgrade was recently abandoned by the original developer after five years [1], but the community is now continuing to maintain the tool as Topgrade-rs [2]. For simplicity's sake, I will simply refer to the community fork of the tool as Topgrade in this article.

One for All