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some time ago I read that aptitude is the preferred tool for installation on debian based systems.

But when you search around on howto administer a debian based system then aptitude is rarely mentioned. Most people seem to prefer apt-get - and that's even true for the debian wiki pages!

So I am wondering if I have missed some point. What is the right tool to use actually?

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aptitude is just a terminal based front-end GUI for apt (although you can still use it on the command line if you want). So you can use aptitude when you want to easily see which packages you have installed, which are obsolete, etc, and use apt-get when you want to do things quickly from the command-line. Neither is better than the other at installing/uninstalling software since they both have the same outcome, so it just comes down to personal preference. Use whichever you prefer.

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thanks a lot! I know that aptitude has a front-end GUI. But I never use it that way. I always use e.g. aptitude install g++. – Vokuhila-Oliba Jan 9 '10 at 10:20
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I've had experiences where aptitude was a lot better at removing dependencies. So I started using it for everything. – Sirupsen Jan 9 '10 at 10:27
Agree with Sirupsen: apt-get gave me a problem once, while aptitude don't (yet...). So for me aptitude wins for now. – dag729 Jan 9 '10 at 21:16
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-1: false claim - apt-get and aptitude handle conflicts between dependencies differently, as Sirupsen said. Cf. superuser.com/questions/93656/… – Charles Stewart Feb 26 '10 at 19:35
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up vote 16 down vote

Aptitude and apt-get work the same for many tasks, but for the most tricky cases, such as distribution upgrades (apt-get dist-upgrade vs. aptitude full-upgrade), they have different rules, and aptitude's rules are nearly always better in practice where they disagree.

The reason you see more documentation for apt-get over aptitude is mostly inertia: aptitude has not been the recommended front end to APT for all that long, so much of the existing documentation hasn't been updated, and there are plenty of people who recognise the advantages of aptitude over apt-get but use apt-get reflexively.

I've recently got to the point where I usually follow "apt" with a "i" and not a "-" when I type.

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In addition to that, aptitude allows to browse through possible resolutions of conflicts easily, whereas with apt-get you usually have only one possible way shown and either you accept it or you have to do resolution by hand (f.e. using dpkg). – liori Feb 26 '10 at 23:13
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apt-get does have the advantage of being more memory-efficient. This is unlikely to be noticeable for most users; I wasn't really aware of it until I tried to upgrade packages on a full Debian install with 32MB of RAM. aptitude ended up thrashing in swap for about an hour per run; apt-get was significantly faster. – intuited Jun 30 '10 at 19:22
@intuited: Good to know, thanks. – Charles Stewart Jun 30 '10 at 20:11
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There's no right tool, you can mix & match both depending on the one that you find most convenient for the task at hand. aptitude is a great tool for testing/sid users but it tends to be less reliable for dist-upgrading from one stable to the next. See my article apt-get, aptitude, … pick the right package manager for you.

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