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Comment by wting | Hacker News Reader

As a side note, aptitude is a superior package management tool to apt-get. The syntax is the same, but aptitude has 3 main advantages:

1) Keeps track of system state. Tracks packages installed as dependencies, and remove them when necessary meaning no orphaned packages.

2) Handles recommends well. apt-get fails to handle recommends, which many packages depend on to pull in dependencies.

3) Searching. More intuitive and better formatted than apt-cache search. There is also the text UI when running aptitude directly. For example, how do I find all installed python packages?

    $ apt-cache search python
    Returns all packages with python in title or description.

    $ aptitude search '~ipython'

    $ aptitude search python | grep ^i # installed packages are flagged with i on the first line

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"apt-cache search" does AND search over everything by default which is neat to find software for something. with aptitude you have to use some cryptic flags for that.

to look for packages that you have installed use "dpkg -l"

aptitude is otherwise great and I prefer it over apt-get

With aptitude you would use the description flag (~d) like so:

    $ aptitude search '~dautojump'
    p   autojump                                 - shell extension to jump to frequently used directories                          
    p   jumpapplet                               - autojump notification icon, to jump to frequently used directories

"and remove them when necessary meaning no orphaned packages."

I understand the reasoning in this, the only downside is that it means if I've started to use something that only got installed as a dependency, it can disappear without warning.

"More intuitive and better formatted than apt-cache search."

This is neat, I may start using it.

To be honest, a lot of people have recommended aptitude to me over the years, but I've never seen enough of a benefit to try to override my muscle memory. I guess it's a classic "bicycle problem".

"and remove them when necessary meaning no orphaned packages."

Is this the same as:

"apt-get autoremove"

I use aptitude because I can use one tool to search and install, I never learned when to use apt-get and when time use apt-cache.

If a package depends on a recommendation, then that sounds like a packaging bug. Report it to the package maintainer.

Although aptitude still has some bugs on bi(/multi)-arch machines, i.e. you install x64 on your machine but still install some packages in x86 for compatibility reasons; aptitude sometimes has dependency issues.

It's not a bug, but it is a problem. Aptitude's resolver is pickier. Debian has finally embraced multiarch systems and restructured x86 packages. It can still lead to weird dependency issues (but they're just that—issues with dependencies), but they're far less common and this strategy seems to have given them the confidence to include a lot more x86 library coverage than there once was.

Just for the record apt-get (in Debian at-least) supports 1 and 2 as well.

I find Arch Linux's pacman/AUR far better than apt-get or Aptitude. Apt is all over the place - apt-get, dpkg, and building from source is just another story.

I've been using apt-get on this laptop for 2 years. If I start running aptitude, what should I know?

Nothing really. It's the same interface to the same software.

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