TIL apt isn't literally the same thing as apt-get

But apt-get also has install, remove, update and upgrade...

TIL I'm a script

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 ).

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!

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.

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.

You may want to tell your friend to check it now!

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.

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 for apt, which can change between releases.

apt | cowsay

Here lie dragons. Make sure you understand commands that you run on your computer. 👍