apt-get has a fixed format machine parseable output
apts output tries to be more human readable and is subject to change
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.
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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.
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)
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.
Ditto. I started my linux journey with Slackware 1.0 that I got in a book. I quickly got tired of dual booting so I picked up a used 486dx66 on Craigslist. It even came with a green on black 12" CRT! I took a class and started hacking on the kernel to learn the innards. I fixed a semaphore issue, improved the task scheduler for performance and constantly rebuilt the kernel for performance (before modularized drivers were a thing). I learned not to panic from a kernel panic.
Slackware’s “package manager” was a notepad next to the computer. I switched to debian later and loved the whole idea of a package manager. Mostly because it was a trove of free software, but also because it would handle all the dependencies for me and cleanly uninstall (at a time when disk space was valuable).
Those were the days! Long live apt & apt-get!
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.
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.
I think there is a difference between spending hours trying to understand a system or solving a problem vs hours of doomscrolling, brainrot and dopamine genocide
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…?
Lots of toddlers out there with phones/tablets.
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.
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.
TIL apt isn’t literally the same thing as apt-get
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.
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
You forgot to “beep boop.” Please report for debugging.
Will they take me off the cron schedule?? I’m scared
You and me both, makes sense though for me LMAO
I always struggled with captchas and now I know why.
Or a long time Debian user from before the
aptcommand!
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 ).
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
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?Sure, but as I understood, the question was how to do that “properly” with dpkg and apt-get, i.e. without the ‘new’ apt script.
The binary is called apt-get. There are others like apt-cache etc.
Apt is a script that just figures out which binary to use and passes the arguments on.
- apt update -> apt-get update
- apt policy -> apt-cache policy
You know, I thought I knew why, but this was new information to me, so I guess I didn’t.
Thanks for sharing this concise explico!
🎵
APT, APT, APT, APT
Just meet me at the…
🎵
I came in for the jokes but all I found was helpful responses. Did I get the Nazi virus from Reddit?
Following this post for replies, for a friend of course
You may want to tell your friend to check it now!
Friends says thanks, friend !
aptis newer and mostly supersedes apt-get/apt-cache/etc tools, tries to be a more-approachable frontend.They interoperate though, so if you’re happy with using a mix of them, go for it. I generally just use
apt.EDIT: There were also some older attempts to produce a unified frontend, like
aptitude.Aptitude is great (my favorite way of managing packages), but it’s a TUI program. You can use it as CLI, at which point it mimics apt-get.
So I would say it never attempted to unify apt commands, by rather it successfully provided a user friendly way to do most (all?) of what you could do with apt CLI tools.
mostly supersedes apt-get/apt-cache/etc tools,
Except for in scripts. Debian guarantee that the output format of
apt-getwill never change and thus it’s safe to use in scripts that parse the output, whereas they don’t have the same guarantee forapt, which can change between releases.They interoperate though, so if you’re happy with using a mix of them, go for it.
Same goes for
nala, BTW.
One has super cow powers, the other one doesn’t.
apt | cowsay
But unfortunately,
apt moo | cowsaydoes something horrible to the cow in the speech bubble.
Wait until you learn of aptitude…
Dpkg
Pfff I know all about the aptitude, who do you think I am? Someone who doesn’t know the aptitude? I use it all the time for a lot of … stuff the aptitude does
aptitude has been my go-to since at least woody or potato.
One of the lines of all time.
@randamumaki@lemmy.blahaj.zone @cm0002 Oh, hey, I found myself on here.
When working with RHEL I always flip a coin to see if I’m gonna use yum or dnf this time
Wasn’t yum just mapped to dnf a while back?
What is dnf anyway? I see that used on later RH-based distros instead of yum.
deleted by creator
dnf is the replacement to yum. It is apparently short for “Dandified Yum”.
TIL that it was lol
I’ll just copy whatever is in the guide I’m following at the time.
Here lie dragons. Make sure you understand commands that you run on your computer. 👍
Cargo-culture is alive and well in the era of LLMs
People don’t change. Some people look at what they’re repeating and try to understand the why, others blindly do what they are told by whom they deem as authority. LLMs are the latest, earlier were various websites (which LLMs were trained on, uh oh), still before that were the computer magazines with things to type in and the later versions even maybe a free CD of stuff. The printed media was less likely to have malicious things in them, but lord did they have errors, and the right error in the wrong place could ruin someone’s day if they just ran it without understanding it.
Yes, I’m aware of that.
That’s good. 👍
Nala gang rise up!
