Difference between NUGET Package <-> dotnet tool regarding EF Core Tools

Question

I wanted to try and learn using EF Core with my asp.net core apps.

I am very confused what's the difference between a lot of the stuff that's available and hope somebody can explain the differences:

1. I have been using the GUI Packager Manager for VS a lot, but there seem to be at least THREE more consoles, what's the difference? The descriptions didn't help very much, since the introductory sentence on all of them is pretty much the same... PMC NUGET CLI dotnet CLI

They are all used to install NuGet Packages. Great...

2. Here the command dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef is used and labeled .NET CLI, but in my tutorial it is actually executed from the PCM! In addition the tools then are installed in C:\Users\USER_DIR.dotnet\tools which to my understanding has NOTHING to do with a nuget package that is installed inside a VS PROJECT ?!

Result:

3. But then what are these?

JFF I tried the adding the "dotnet-ef" one to my .NET Core 6 project and I got an error that only Core 3.1 is supported for this.

In any case I'm confused now. I thought tools are global (or path-local) and NuGet Packages are additional .dlls inside your project. Is that true? And if so, how come, that the EF Core tools come in both variants?

I understand I need those to add the EF .dlls to my project

• Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer (if this is the chosen server)
• Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore (is this hard req?)
• Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Design (sais microsoft)

But I don't understand what the nuget version of the tools is for. Thanks...