by Eck » 2007-11-21 20:08
I don't share the anti-gui sentiment many have. I figure that if both a command-line and a GUI do EXACTLY the same, or if the GUI is even better, than I'd give preference to the GUI.
But in this case, the command-line is better, or at least aptitude even with its gui. Not because it's a gui vs. command-line, but because the software updater and synaptic are front-ends to apt, but aptitude, although another front-end yeah, offers a user a different way that if used should be used alone. That means if you want to use aptitude, that's all you should use. It needs to be kept aware of everything that gets installed to make use of its advanced removing automatically installed packages. The only way it is aware of these is if it installed them. So when you remove something, things auto-installed by dependency or recommends are also removed if nothing else uses them. I'm glad it's there to keep track of these sort of things rather than my needing to do that!
I have no problem with the software updater however. I just never used it to actually install anything, but rather to let me know there are upgrades available. As soon as it popped that up, I would open a terminal and do:
su -
(root password)
aptitude update
aptitude safe-upgrade
Go through that
aptitude full-upgrade (which is the dist-upgrade formally)
Yeah, I'd dist-upgrade daily on Lenny. On Sid, if I were to run that, I would uninstall or deactivate software updater since I would only want to do safe-upgrades frequently and full (dist)-upgrades perhaps weekly once I saw that they would have everything they needed to work properly put into Sid. Sometimes apps get put into Sid in pieces and will break stuff if all the newer pieces aren't in there yet.
See, not wanting to actually do the full or dist-upgrade as soon as they are available, which would be the case for me in Sid if I used it, makes the software-updater a pain in the neck since it would always be flashing and beeping at me!
But in a case where one is on Lenny and wants the easy reminder I found the software updater to be handy. But I would NOT use it to install things as it would not use aptitude to do so, but simply use its front end to apt-get commands. Not good enough for me. I only want aptitude to install or remove things in Debian.
Lots of differing opinions on this stuff, but that's how I've felt about it.
Whatever, don't bother with Adept on Debian if you use KDE. It's buggy. I think they fixed most of the bugs on Ubuntu, so there it's okay (also because one shouldn't use aptitude at all these days on such a customized distro like Ubuntu).
Aptitude for Debian. Apt-get for any other Debian based derivative distro. And so Synaptic and the software update and also Adept (as long as it's been fixed) are fine for the other distros since they just are nice front-ends for apt that do precisely the same things.
There is no GUI (except for Aptitude's own) that does exactly what Aptitude does.
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