Q1: What is indeed an AppStore?

It’s a Package Manager(or, Application Manager), a software which

  1. Find source of applications
  2. Download and install Libraries the app depends on
  3. Check updates regularly

Efficiency

Without a Package Manager, you have to go to github and install/update applications & related libs by yourself. You can image how tedious and time-consuming it could be!

Package Manager for different OS

AppStore has a GUI (Graphical User Interface). While in Linux case, there’s usually not.

  • Ubuntu copied apt-get from Debian
  • Fedora’s yum
  • Archlinux’s pacman

Q2: How about pip?

Things are all designed in the same way.

pip is a package manager for python. Even sublime has its own package manager

Q3: Anaconda vs pip?

Anaconda also manage packages, but more than that. It also manages the whole distribution of e.g. Python3.5, i.e. all associated libs with python3.5, which makes Python2.7 and Python3.5’s co-existence possible.