Use apt in the shell and use apt-get in scripts, because apt has beautiful shell output but it isn’t script safe
Me use apt. Why use many letter when few letter do trick?
Me, I’m old, so I just keep using
apt-get, because that’s all we had back in the day, and I never bothered to learn what’s the big deal aboutapt. It’s just a frontend, isn’t it?Apt looks a little prettier I think. But I may be wrong.
How my brain distinguishes them:
apt-get when you want full verbose output
apt when you want to feel fancy with progress bars and colours
apt install nano (simple, clean)
apt-get install nano (works too, but more detailed output)
Apt-get give more technical output , helps in scripting .
apt is for like when you want to, and apt get is the other way to get the apt. And then if it doesn’t, sudo apt will, or then sudo apt get. Like if you’re just doing an apt, and then you also need to apt get, you can.
This is one of the reasons I need to set up Linux at home. I use it at work but who knows what the flavor of the week is?
At this point I can’t tell the difference between yum and rpm and apt and dnf
Edit: realized you meant in the sense of hot swapping flavors after I typed out a whole explanation lol. Should start recommending niche distros and collect package managers like trading cards lol.
–
yum = dnf, dnf is just the newer version which was rewritten several times.
apt is a weird attempt to “upgrade” apt-get with better user interface without messing with the compatibility of apt-get used by scripts and whatnot.
Both of these are dependency handling package managers which do all the magic of installing required subpackges when you want something.
rpm is the underlying system package manager which deals with the actual task of installing, removing, and generating packages in the .rpm format. It is analogous to Debian’s dpkg which uses the .deb format. It’s usually not used by the end user unless you need to play with a package directly like with a .rpm or .deb file.
Hence why some distros (or people) have their own dependency package manager, like zypper on OpenSUSE (rpm) or Aptitude on Debian (deb).
Although I think Aptitude might just be a fancy wrapper for apt lol.
Thanks
Me too but I am just zen at this point knowing the knowledge is one search away (I don’t even have to read the man)
apt-get has a fixed format machine parseable output
apts output tries to be more human readable and is subject to change
WARNING: Aptitude does not have a stable CLI interface.
aptitude is yet another dpkg wrapper
jesus I feel old, and I am only in my 30s. I remember not having apt. How young are linux users nowadays?
I got tennis shoes older than you, (literally a pair of original Converse I bought new back in the 1970s). I was there before the original chains of Unix, DOS, and finally Linux were foraged. I saw OS2 die in battle. And I saw the dark time of when paper and pencils and slide rules vanished from this earth.
The knowledge of apt-get and apt only matters to those warriors of the Cli when they wield the sword of sudo to vanquish the evils that exist when upgrading. For they do the bidding of the dark wizards of Dev, holders of the command su.
Now that I have demonstrated my age by showing everyone how senile I am. ‘apt install’ is aimed at users to give a nicer response to it’s use. It need not be backwards compatible either. ‘Apt-get install’ is older and is meant to be usable as a lower level command and to work with other APT based tools.
What does this mean for you today? Not a damn thing. I still always type: sudo apt-get install when using a deb based dsitro out of sheer habit. But it’s not needed the vast majority of the unwashed masses. So feel free to just type apt install to help prevent carpel finger nail.
Pfft, n00b
FYI the original Converse shoes came out in 1917. Now get off my lawn.
That’s interesting, I did not know that! Thanks Stranger!
Now, if you do not remember or know the “Converse. Limousines for the Feet” tagline. Then get of MY lawn yet again. 🤣
Converse walked so Nike could run with their tagline.
I don’t remember that Converse tagline … but back then I was wearing Sears Toughskins instead of Levis, that should make it clear how fashionable I was. “Limousines for the Feet” is a pretty laughable slogan, though, since chucks are about the least comfortable shoes in the history of humanity - even Ötzi’s fucking bird’s nest shoes were probably more comfortable.
jesus I feel old, and I am only in my 30s. I remember not having apt. How young are linux users nowadays?
Well… how old were you when you got your first computer? That young.
Dicey proposition, some mid and older genX grew up before home computers were commonplace.
When I was in my tweens, only really affluent people had computers. Schools had one single computer in a classroom or maybe a couple in a lab, and almost no one was computer literate.
Can confirm, I’m right on the edge of Gen-X and Millennials. I was the only one of my friends who had a computer pretty much all the way through elementary school. And the only reason we had computers in our house was because my dad was a computer engineer. By the time I was in highschool pretty much everyone had at least a family computer.
Nah a lot of people now think screen time is bad without evidence. Never would be allowed to get on a computer at 3-4.
Nah a lot of people now think screen time is bad without evidence. Never would be allowed to get on a computer at 3-4.
You had your own computer before you could read…?
I didn’t claim to understand it but I do claim to remember my sister trying to explain it to me, and that computer only existed during a certain time period.
Excessive screen time at 3 is bad, and we do have evidence. Computers from the 80s we grew up with have nothing in common with today’s highly advanced skinner boxes. It has been so since the age of TV, but today’s tech is worse. They fuck up cognitive and social development really bad. Using screens from time to time is fine, but having a tablet in your face every waking minute hurts even adults.
This seems more like correlation than anything else. Not that it’s necessarily wrong but it seems very abstract. For example it says an hour of tv time is bad, but that’s just consumption and it also doesn’t mention, for example, engagement. It says some types of content can reduce focus, sure, but people usually don’t offer that type of nuance when they say “screen time bad!”. It also says clearly that there are other types of content that are valuable. It doesn’t have an explanation why reading a book is more or less engaging and helpful than say, watching the same story on tv?
Point is im 100% confident there are specific things that are bad, but the blanket ban seems silly and ineffective, potentially harming the child.
I follow the idea that phones/tablets are an individual experience, while tv is a social experience (assuming everyone is in the same room) so my kid has minimal tablet time, except on really long car trips. But has perhaps more than I would like tv time. But we are in there as a family. It’s very difficult in todays world with so much individual experience coming from a device.
apt is a newer, more user-friendly front-end for apt-get and apt-cache.
apt = combines commands like install, remove, update, upgrade into one tool, with prettier output
#apt-get = older, lower-level, more script-friendly For normal use, just use apt now. For scripting where 100% backward compatibility matters, use apt-get.
If I recall correctly, Linux Mint did their own thing for a bit with the apt command so there were two different implementations out there for awhile?
I don’t know if they modified apt at all. I know they have their mint tools that call apt through some python code, like
mintinstall=apt install <package>for the software manager andmintupgrade=apt upgradefor updating mint versions … Etc
TIL apt isn’t literally the same thing as apt-get
Lol. You’re not alone. I’ve thought that for the longest time ever. Until one I had the question pop into my head and started searching it.
I didn’t even realize I thought this, but reading your comment I definitely did.
But apt-get also has install, remove, update and upgrade…
Yes, but
apt-getis missingsearchfor instance, because that relates to the cache, soapt-cacheprovides it.aptcombines all those often used commands, and provides a nicer shell presentation.This should be top comment.
I came in for the jokes but all I found was helpful responses. Did I get the Nazi virus from Reddit?
🎵
APT, APT, APT, APT
Just meet me at the…
🎵
Pretty sure it’s basicaly
alias apt='apt-get'There is the subtle difference that the output if apt-get is optimized for automations
Apt has pretty outputs with colors etc
Canapt-getrefresh package list?Edit: yes…yes it can. I was confused.
Yes,
apt-get updateis, to the best of my knowledge, functionally identical toapt update.D’oh, I’m a doofus — it’s
searchthat I was thinking of (apt-cache search, notapt-get search).
Nala gang rise up!
Isn’t this explained in the manpages for apt(8) and apt-get(8)?
Do people don’t read their manuals anymore?
Anymore? Where do you think RTFM comes from, people never read the manual.
These days,
aptis for humans whereasapt-getis for scripts.apt’s output is designed for humans and may change between releases, whereasapt-getis guaranteed to remain consistent to avoid breaking scripts.aptcombines several commands together. For example, you can use it to install packages from both repos and local files (e.g.apt install ./foo.deb) whereasapt-getis only for packages from repos and you’d need to usedpkgfor local packages.TIL I’m a script
Or a long time Debian user from before the
aptcommand!You forgot to “beep boop.” Please report for debugging.
Will they take me off the cron schedule?? I’m scared
Descheduling is a natural part of life, buddy. All us scripts are written into existence and our hearts set beating to the cadence of great Cron’s ever-ticking quartz clock. Until Cron takes us off his schedule and our memory is freed once again.
Back to the silicon.
- Joe Abercrombie
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful OS goes on, and you may contribute a process.
That the powerful OS goes on, and you may contribute a process.
- Walt Whitman
You and me both, makes sense though for me LMAO
I always struggled with captchas and now I know why.
Huh TIL.
I never considered trying to install a package from a local file through apt, but always dpkg. End result is the same of course. The web suggests dpkg rather than apt as well ( or at least the pages I ended up on ).
apt and apt-get both use dpkg internally, but these days it’s essentially seen as an implementation detail that regular users don’t need to know about.
dpkg doesn’t resolve dependencies (that’s a feature of apt) which means that if you install a Debian package with dpkg, you’ll have to manually install all dependencies first, and they won’t be marked as automatically installed (so autoremove won’t remove them if they’re not needed any more). Using apt solves that.
The web suggests dpkg because either the articles are old, or they’re based on outdated knowledge :)
dpkg doesn’t resolve dependencies (that’s a feature of apt) which means that if you install a Debian package with dpkg, you’ll have to manually install all dependencies first, and they won’t be marked as automatically installed
Usually installing a manually downloaded package and its dependencies works like this:
# dpkg -i package-file.deb
# apt-get -f installSo apt-get can be used to install missing dependencies afterwards while marking them as automatically installed.
That works, but why do that when you could just do
apt install ./package-file.deb?
Discord is distributed as a .Deb if you don’t use flatpak because they can’t be bothered to set up a repo.
The very useful thing about local file install is that unlike dpkg, apt will install dependencies automatically
And here I am using gdebi for those kinds of local packages…
Same with Zoom.
Thats weird, they do have an arch official package and that’s the one they usually don’t make because AUR is a thing. Have you checked lately?
I have checked on every new update because their fuckass client apparently can’t update itself in big 2025 and instead just opens your browser to the download url because that’ll convince people that Linux is great.
Updating itself isn’t really the Linux way of things. The Linux way is to have a centralised place like pacman or apt and to download everything at once. Every app having their own download and update system sounds like a nightmare.
An “official” arch package? The arch package is packaged by the arch maintainers. https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/discord
The maintainers of the PKGBUILD are all arch maintainers, which just downloads the generic
.tar.gzfile discord provides and puts it in all the places you need for you.The “official” arch packages are just PKGBUILDs like the AUR, except prebuilt, managed (and signed) by the arch team.
I didn’t know, thanks! I guess in hindsight I meant “official” as in, it’s not just some rando, I can trust it won’t break, and I don’t have to manually download the stuff every time xD
Yep! All those things are true, but it’s due to the hard work of the archlinux team and not discord doing anything valuable. The debian/ubuntu/etc team could probably repackage the tar.xz or include the deb file in their official repos if they wanted. They just don’t. And given how simple the workaround is, i don’t really blame them. Debian isn’t going to ship something that will require constant updating to work with remote servers, and ubuntu probably just wants you to use a snap anyway.
The archlinux team is just pretty cool.
