jesus I feel old, and I am only in my 30s. I remember not having apt. How young are linux users nowadays?
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.
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
But apt-get also has install, remove, update and upgrade…
Yes, but
apt-get
is missingsearch
for instance, because that relates to the cache, soapt-cache
provides it.apt
combines all those often used commands, and provides a nicer shell presentation.
🎵
APT, APT, APT, APT
Just meet me at the…
🎵
These days,
apt
is for humans whereasapt-get
is for scripts.apt
’s output is designed for humans and may change between releases, whereasapt-get
is guaranteed to remain consistent to avoid breaking scripts.apt
combines 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-get
is only for packages from repos and you’d need to usedpkg
for 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
apt
command.
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
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.gz
file 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
And here I am using gdebi for those kinds of local packages…
Same with Zoom.
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 :)
@fluckx@lemmy.world
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 install
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!
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 !
apt
is 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-get
will 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 | cowsay
does 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.
Nala gang rise up!
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-get
refresh package list?Edit: yes…yes it can. I was confused.
Yes,
apt-get update
is, to the best of my knowledge, functionally identical toapt update
.D’oh, I’m a doofus — it’s
search
that I was thinking of (apt-cache search
, notapt-get search
).
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.
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. 👍
I know about these and git and flatpaks and snaps and can definitely explain them all to you! But unfortunately, I just remembered I left my oven on…