Me, I'm old, so I just keep using apt-get, because that's all we had back in the day, and I never bothered to learn what's the big deal about apt. It's just a frontend, isn't it?
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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Apt looks a little prettier I think. But I may be wrong.
How my brain distinguishes them:
apt-get when you want full verbose output
apt when you want to feel fancy with progress bars and colours
apt is for like when you want to, and apt get is the other way to get the apt. And then if it doesn't, sudo apt will, or then sudo apt get. Like if you're just doing an apt, and then you also need to apt get, you can.
apt-get has a fixed format machine parseable output
apts output tries to be more human readable and is subject to change
WARNING: Aptitude does not have a stable CLI interface.
aptitude is yet another dpkg wrapper
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 canβt 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.
--
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.
FYI the original Converse shoes came out in 1917. Now get off my lawn.
Pfft, n00b
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.
Can confirm, I'm right on the edge of Gen-X and Millennials. I was the only one of my friends who had a computer pretty much all the way through elementary school. And the only reason we had computers in our house was because my dad was a computer engineer. By the time I was in highschool pretty much everyone had at least a family computer.
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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
Lol. You're not alone. I've thought that for the longest time ever. Until one I had the question pop into my head and started searching it.
I didnβt even realize I thought this, but reading your comment I definitely did.
If I recall correctly, Linux Mint did their own thing for a bit with the apt command so there were two different implementations out there for awhile?
I don't know if they modified apt at all. I know they have their mint tools that call apt through some python code, like mintinstall = apt install <package> for the software manager and mintupgrade = apt upgrade for updating mint versions ... Etc
But apt-get also has install, remove, update and upgrade...
Yes, but apt-get is missing search for instance, because that relates to the cache, so apt-cache provides it.
apt combines all those often used commands, and provides a nicer shell presentation.
Thank you
This should be top comment.
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!
These days, apt is for humans whereas apt-get is for scripts. apt's output is designed for humans and may change between releases, whereas apt-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) whereas apt-get is only for packages from repos and you'd need to use dpkg 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
Descheduling is a natural part of life, buddy. All us scripts are written into existence and our hearts set beating to the cadence of great Cron's ever-ticking quartz clock. Until Cron takes us off his schedule and our memory is freed once again.
Back to the silicon.
- Joe Abercrombie
The question, O me! so sad, recurringβWhat good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are hereβthat life exists and identity,
That the powerful OS goes on, and you may contribute a process.
That the powerful OS goes on, and you may contribute a process.
- Walt Whitman
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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
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APT, APT, APT, APT
Just meet me at the...
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