Adept, how stable is it?

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Cheese Roller · #1 Post by **Cheese Roller** » 2008-04-28 20:06

My only experience using Adept was in Kubuntu and it screwed up so much I ended up formatting 3 times.

Synaptic is a very nice program but I would like to use something under qt instead. How stable is Adept and how does it compare to the features and usability of Synaptic?

Penguin Skinner · #2 Post by **Penguin Skinner** » 2008-04-28 20:21

All the engineers at a company I work with use Kubuntu, and one of the first things they all did was uninstall Adept. It seems quite a few people have reported problems with Adept, so I'd probably avoid it at least until they get things sorted out.

IMO Synaptic is the best of the gui front ends for apt, and it's actually fairly "KDE friendly", requiring no *gnome* or *bonobo* libraries. Install the "gtk-qt-engine" package and it actually looks pretty good.

AdrianTM · #3 Post by **AdrianTM** » 2008-04-28 20:23

I prefer KPackage. Adept is slow and annoying and actually doesn't install in Sid anymore it has been broken for a long time and nobody bothers to fix it (not that I care... )

Cheese Roller · #4 Post by **Cheese Roller** » 2008-04-28 20:26

So I take it Adept is the same way it was in Kubuntu huh?

How is Kpackage? It looks more complicated from what I see.

AdrianTM · #5 Post by **AdrianTM** » 2008-04-28 20:32

Personally I like it, other people prefer Synaptic (or Adept) but to me it's nice that I don't have to enter root credentials until I really do something that needs root access. It's also pretty simple to search packages, it has inline search... you just select the package and click install or uninstall, I don't think is complicated.

Cheese Roller · #6 Post by **Cheese Roller** » 2008-04-28 20:42

AdrianTM wrote:I prefer KPackage. Adept is slow and annoying and actually doesn't install in Sid anymore

As an unrelated question I am finding a lot of people on this forum who use Sid. Do you use it for testing or do you just like to live on the bleeding edge?

AdrianTM · #7 Post by **AdrianTM** » 2008-04-28 20:50

I live on the bleeding edge

, this current install has been on my computer for one year and I've never had a problem that I could not solve, however I caution people to not use it on "production" machines. Oh, and I just realized that I lied about KPackage, I actually prefer apt-get most of the times...

Penguin Skinner · #8 Post by **Penguin Skinner** » 2008-04-28 20:50

Cheese Roller wrote:So I take it Adept is the same way it was in Kubuntu huh?

How is Kpackage? It looks more complicated from what I see.

Yeah, if I'm not mistaken Adept was written/developed and is maintained by people at Canonical (the K/Ubuntu folks.) My impression of it is that they were trying for a more Windows-like experience, for example the auto-upgrade feature. Like many Linux users, I don't want to give up control over critical operations with the potential to hose my system. Synaptic is quite good in that respect, notifying you of what packages will be upgraded, installed or removed, and asking for your approval before it does anything.

I haven't tried Kpackage for a long time ... mostly what I like a gui apt frontend for is browsing packages, checking package status, etc. and Kpackage didn't seem as usable to me as Synaptic. But IMO it would certainly be worth checking out.

Cheese Roller · #9 Post by **Cheese Roller** » 2008-04-28 20:52

Yeah I agree. I cannot stand auto updates. I just have my debian box download the files in the background but I have them manually installed myself. That makes is VERY quick for when I need to update and still gives me the full control of my system!

Absent Minded · #10 Post by **Absent Minded** » 2008-04-28 22:25

Adept works good from my experiance but I wont use it any more for installing kernels. Had a bad experiance doing that.

rickh · #11 Post by **rickh** » 2008-04-28 23:03

Adept sucks, and as a result, has been pulled from Lenny and Sid. Maybe at some future date it's upstream developers will generate something not totally disgusting and it'll get another trial.

My position is well known ... All GUI package managers (including Synaptic) are worthless and unnecessary fat for your well designed Debian system. If you just want a free (as in beer) Windows OS, GUI installers are fine; otherwise, do it right ... learn aptitude, or at least apt-get

EMD · #12 Post by **EMD** » 2008-04-29 00:03

rickh wrote:If you just want a free (as in beer) Windows OS, GUI installers are fine; otherwise, do it right ... learn aptitude, or at least apt-get

I agree and we shouldn't just stop there!

"No graphical text editors in Debian! Use Emacs or Vi!"
"No word processors in Debian! Use LaTeX!"
"No spreadsheets in Debian! Use R!"
"No graphical web browsers in Debian! Use Lynx or w3m!"

"While we're at it, let's get rid of the whole X Window System!"

.

rickh · #13 Post by **rickh** » 2008-04-29 01:25

we shouldn't just stop there!

I can't imagine why you would want to go to those extremes. Keep the "tools" ... get rid of the "toys".

EMD · #14 Post by **EMD** » 2008-04-29 01:55

rickh wrote:
we shouldn't just stop there!
I can't imagine why you would want to go to those extremes. Keep the "tools" ... get rid of the "toys".

Where does "tool" end and "toy" begin?
.

AdrianTM · #15 Post by **AdrianTM** » 2008-04-29 02:15

edoviak wrote:
rickh wrote:
we shouldn't just stop there!
I can't imagine why you would want to go to those extremes. Keep the "tools" ... get rid of the "toys".
Where does "tool" end and "toy" begin?
.

It depends on the elitism of the person, the more elitist the person is the more of a tool he or she is.

rickh · #16 Post by **rickh** » 2008-04-29 02:18

Where does "tool" end and "toy" begin?

From another thread:

5. Debian Users ... appreciate the command line and learn to use it for those applications for which it is especially efficient.

When the GUI app is no easier to use than the CLI app, and adds no functionality, it's a toy.

EMD · #17 Post by **EMD** » 2008-04-29 02:38

rickh wrote:When the GUI app is no easier to use than the CLI app, and adds no functionality, it's a toy.

Hmmm ... In that case, I think I'll start using Synaptic more often because it is easier to use than apt-get or aptitude and it does add more functionality.

For example, I remember struggling to compress a folder into a ZIP file for a friend. Nothing worked. Two days later, I realized that I had forgotten to install the zip package.

Had I opened up Synaptic and searched for ark, all I would have had to do is right-click and look to see which recommended packages are also installed. I would have immediately noticed that zip wasn't installed, I could have immediately installed it with a couple of clicks and I could have spared myself some embarrassment.

So yes! I'll start using Synaptic more often!
.

mike102282 · #18 Post by **mike102282** » 2008-04-29 02:39

edoviak wrote:
rickh wrote:When the GUI app is no easier to use than the CLI app, and adds no functionality, it's a toy.
Hmmm ... In that case, I think I'll start using Synaptic more often because it is easier to use than apt-get or aptitude and it does add more functionality.

For example, I remember struggling to compress a folder into a ZIP file for a friend. Nothing worked. Two days later, I realized that I had forgotten to install the zip package.

Had I opened up Synaptic and searched for ark, all I would have had to do is right-click and look to see which recommended packages are also installed. I would have immediately noticed that zip wasn't installed, I could have immediately installed it with a couple of clicks and I could have spared myself some embarrassment.

So yes! I'll start using Synaptic more often!
.

it lists recommended packages in the CLI too.

EMD · #19 Post by **EMD** » 2008-04-29 02:45

mike102282 wrote:it lists recommended packages in the CLI too.

Yes, but can you see at one glance which packages are recommended and which of those recommended packages are installed?

Can you then install the recommended packages that you need in two clicks of the mouse? Or do you have to type a bunch of commands?
.

rickh · #20 Post by **rickh** » 2008-04-29 03:02

The default behaviour of Aptitude is to install "recommends". That's what mine does ... no worries.