Not OP. I like apt. But I switched over from redhat/fedora to Ubuntu like 15+ years ago, and I will say the rpm command offered much better options for querying package metadata. What mostly comes to mind is searching for files belonging to a package, or finding what package a file belongs to. dpkg/ apt-* can’t do that out of the box without some additional apt-* tools installed. Which is ok, but a bit extra clunky.
Dnf sits on top of rpm (formerly yum did this, formerly up2date did this) the same way apt sits on top of dpkg.
While ultimately they both provide similar general functionality (installing and updating packages) the specific command syntax and switches differ. And some commands imo are more useful than others.
Not that I dislike it, but many quality of life things are missing. One simple example is that a sensible way to manage which packages are automatically installed and not manually has been introduced only recently. Searching for dependencies of packages is quite complex. If you know the name of the executable/library file I’m not sure whether it is possible to retrieve the package who provides it.
Asides from that, it is the one package manager who gave me the most problems when something goes wrong. Not comparing to the problems that arise from arch all the time, but apt often has locking problems, incorrect resolution, impossibilities to upgrade certain packages and many many problems if you start introducing third party repositories.
It is quite usable, don’t get me wrong; but I never felt all this hindrance while using dnf.
The list of upgrades being one big paragraph instead of separate lines is bad enough. I have some Debian servers but never looked if there’s a flag to make it look better.
Also no history or rollback. Madison is dumb as I recall. Just kind of unintuitive and bare bones for me. Dnf (especially dnf5) suit me fine but I’m an rpm homer.
What do you dislike so much about apt?
Not OP. I like apt. But I switched over from redhat/fedora to Ubuntu like 15+ years ago, and I will say the rpm command offered much better options for querying package metadata. What mostly comes to mind is searching for files belonging to a package, or finding what package a file belongs to. dpkg/ apt-* can’t do that out of the box without some additional apt-* tools installed. Which is ok, but a bit extra clunky.
Isn’t dnf the equivalent of apt? I don’t think I’ve ever used rpm, but wouldn’t that be more like using gdebi for deb-packages?
Dnf sits on top of rpm (formerly yum did this, formerly up2date did this) the same way apt sits on top of dpkg.
While ultimately they both provide similar general functionality (installing and updating packages) the specific command syntax and switches differ. And some commands imo are more useful than others.
Not that I dislike it, but many quality of life things are missing. One simple example is that a sensible way to manage which packages are automatically installed and not manually has been introduced only recently. Searching for dependencies of packages is quite complex. If you know the name of the executable/library file I’m not sure whether it is possible to retrieve the package who provides it. Asides from that, it is the one package manager who gave me the most problems when something goes wrong. Not comparing to the problems that arise from arch all the time, but apt often has locking problems, incorrect resolution, impossibilities to upgrade certain packages and many many problems if you start introducing third party repositories. It is quite usable, don’t get me wrong; but I never felt all this hindrance while using dnf.
The list of upgrades being one big paragraph instead of separate lines is bad enough. I have some Debian servers but never looked if there’s a flag to make it look better.
Also no history or rollback. Madison is dumb as I recall. Just kind of unintuitive and bare bones for me. Dnf (especially dnf5) suit me fine but I’m an rpm homer.
When and where did you last use
apt?apt upgrade’s not formatted like that here for me (currently on mx). Uses colour and spaced columns.apt-get upgradeis like that still, one big paragraph.Debian 13 I want to say. I’ll have to look again next time I do it.