Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck

[anonymous234]

@clatter said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

About all I know how to do is sudo apt-get install, but I always spend 10 minutes flailing to guess the exact name of the package I need and how much of the version number I need to type.

Protip: the only two commands you need to remember are "synaptic" and "aptitude".

[Onyx]

@clatter said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

Serious question: why?

IME, its dependency management is vastly superior, handles conflicts better, and any major upgrades were always painless for me, while I had hour long fights with yum and complaints about this and that from its side.

@clatter said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

About all I know how to do is sudo apt-get install, but I always spend 10 minutes flailing to guess the exact name of the package I need and how much of the version number I need to type

apt-cache search to the rescue! apt-file if you don't know which package it is but know the filename of whatever you need (like a missing dependency lib). Also, I abuse tab autocompletion a lot. And once I got used to the naming scheme I can just guess most of it without any of those steps - libraries start with lib*, development packages end with -dev, rest of it is pounding on the tab key or using the search.

[clatter]

@anonymous234 said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

aptitude

Thanks, I'd probably be more comfortable using that. Thing is, it looks just like the yum/dnf/zypper interface, so it seems like a lateral move.

@Onyx said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

IME, its dependency management is vastly superior, handles conflicts better, and any major upgrades were always painless for me, while I had hour long fights with yum and complaints about this and that from its side.

I guess that's the source of the reputation difference, I've just never run into those problems myself. Dnf might have improved in that area. Anyway, thanks also.

[flabdablet]

@clatter said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

flailing to guess the exact name of the package I need

apt search somethingvaguelyrelevant works for me.

how much of the version number I need to type

None, unless you're doing something clever with pinning.

I don't understand what I should be admiring

Not so much the apt suite itself, though it is rather more battle-hardened than rpm/yum; more the obsessively excellent repository curation. The kind of difficulty reported above with the clang library is very much the exception - most of the time, you can apt install something and it really does Just Work.

[flabdablet]

@clatter said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

it looks just like the yum/dnf/zypper interface

Other way round, I think you'll find.

[flabdablet]

@Onyx said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

apt-cache search to the rescue!

I've been using the newish apt front end for most of the things I used to use apt-get and apt-cache for. Less typing and most of the time it does exactly what I want it to.

[asdf]

@flabdablet said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

I've been using the newish apt front end for most of the things I used to use apt-get and apt-cache for. Less typing and most of the time it does exactly what I want it to.

Also, progress bars. :shiny:

[flabdablet]

@asdf And coloured text!

Filed under: party like it's 1999

[remi]

@flabdablet said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

If you're used to RPM based package management, maybe you can also check CentOS out rid yourself of Stockholm Syndrome and come over to the apt side.

Meh. It's easy, just remember that there is apt, aptitude, apt-get and that despite the similar names they don't do the same thing. Or that there are cases where apt-get succeeds while aptitude fails (why? no one knows... but on large upgrades I've noticed that aptitude tends to get stuck on infinite dependency loops while apt-get manages just fine).

Oh, and also, it's good to learn all the ancillary commands such as apt-cache, apt-file etc. Which may or may not be the same thing as "apt cache" (or "aptitude cache", or "apt-get cache"...) etc. And may or may not be referenced in the man pages (so contrary to options, you can't just find information about all of these in one place).

I mean, it does work most of the time and seems to my limited experience better at handling conflicts than rpm, yes. But it's still a nest of weirdness and poorly (if at all) documented stuff, with bits supposed to replace other bits but that don't cover everything and so on. Hardly ideal...

[asdf]

@flabdablet said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

@asdf And coloured textclown vomit!

FTFY

[asdf]

@remi said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

Oh, and also, it's good to learn all the ancillary commands such as apt-cache, apt-file etc.

Forget about apt-cache, forget about aptitude. You should only need apt and apt-file (which will soon be absorbed into apt as well, I guess).

[remi]

@asdf said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

Forget about apt-cache, forget about aptitude. You should only need apt and apt-file (which will soon be absorbed into apt as well, I guess).

Yes, exactly what I was saying (and what I heard years ago about apt-get and aptitude... and now it's with apt...). There are bits and pieces all around the place, some overlapping, some not, and no one knows (or bothered to document it). So as a user, as soon as you step out of the very basic update workflow, you get lost between commands.

[asdf]

@remi said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

So as a user, as soon as you step out of the very basic update workflow, you get lost between commands.

That's exactly why apt was invented. It's supposed to absorb all the others in the near future. Let's hope that this actually happens.

[flabdablet]

@asdf said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

forget about aptitude

Is there an exact apt equivalent for aptitude --purge-unused purge foadiaf? You can get close with apt purge foadiaf; apt --purge autoremove but the aptitude version purges only foadiaf and its automatically installed dependencies; the two-command apt sequence purges all currently-unused auto-installed packages, which is often not what I want.

[asdf]

@flabdablet I have literally never had that problem before. If anything I want to retain shows up as automatically removable, I immediately mark it as manually installed.

[remi]

@asdf said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

@flabdablet I have literally never had that problem before.

Which is exactly the problem with nice statements such as "That's exactly why apt was invented. It's supposed to absorb all the others in the near future". Trying to replace a complex tool with many uses with a new one is not simple and this is not the first time Debian has tried.

So while I hope that this time will be the right one, I am not holding my breath...

(and I'd love to be wrong because I really appreciate all the apt* family and Debian in general!)

[hungrier]

@asdf said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

@remi said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

So as a user, as soon as you step out of the very basic update workflow, you get lost between commands.

That's exactly why apt was invented. It's supposed to absorb all the others in the near future. Let's hope that this actually happens.

:xkcd_comic_about_standards:

[Arantor]

@hungrier it's not even about standards in FOSS, it's literally 'I don't like this for (trivial, irrelevant) raisins, fuck you, Imma do it my way'

[gordonjcp]

@asdf This probably doesn't help you particularly but across a fairly broad range of Ubuntu and Debian machines I can't reproduce the problem. It's more likely some weird interaction in whatever crazy edge-case combination of packages you have there.

[anonymous234]

@asdf said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

Forget about apt-cache, forget about aptitude. You should only need apt and apt-file (which will soon be absorbed into apt as well, I guess).

Aptitude, synaptic: nice graphical interface.

Apt-get: not that

[remi]

@anonymous234 said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

Aptitude, synaptic: nice graphical interface.

Apt-get: not that

aptitude can also be used on command line, exactly like apt-get, and at one point was supposed to become a replacement of apt-get (for command line). You can do "aptitude update" instead of "apt-get update", "aptitude safe-upgrade" instead of "apt-get upgrade", "aptitude full-upgrade" instead of "apt-get dist-upgrade". Except they are not perfect replacements, there are subtle differences.

[dkf]

@flabdablet said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

Is there an exact apt equivalent for aptitude --purge-unused purge foadiaf?

Whatever it is, I'm guessing it involves systemd doing the installation for you…

[Grunnen]

@remi It's indeed not perfect and a bit confusing, but I think that using apt-get for dist-upgrade (as recommended by the manual) and using aptitude with its text-graphical interface to install and remove software works very well.

[remi]

@Grunnen I agree, most of the time it works fine. I've been using one or the other depending on my mood for years, and usually everything works very smoothly.

But just once in a while, it doesn't. And that's when you hate the confusion because it's almost impossible to understand why one thing works and not the other.

And that's why I'm wary of introducing yet-another-system: most of the time, it will work fine, probably even better than now and I'm happy for that. But unless they can guarantee that it will work 100% of the time (and they obviously can't), or purely and simply remove all other tools to make sure they're not used at all, when things fail having one more tool will only add to the confusion.

[cheong]

@remi said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

Which is exactly the problem with nice statements such as "That's exactly why apt was invented. It's supposed to absorb all the others in the near future". Trying to replace a complex tool with many uses with a new one is not simple and this is not the first time Debian has tried.

So while I hope that this time will be the right one, I am not holding my breath...

(and I'd love to be wrong because I really appreciate all the apt* family and Debian in general!)

There was similar problem on RedHat/Fedora family regarding network related tools. I first see them doing so on RH9, and continue see them trying doing so in literally every version before I stopped my role as Linux server administrator (by the time of Fedora Core 5), and seems they're still keep trying.

[Onyx]

@cheong said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

on RedHat/Fedora family regarding network related tools

One of the reasons I prefer Debian family from administration side of things: networking setup makes so much more sense to me on Debian. I always found RHEL to be a freaking mess when it comes to that.

Also, Apache.

[Grunnen]

@remi Well, yes, at least they could remove tools and options that are not useful anymore. Like command-line usage of aptitude, or the dselect program (has anyone ever used that in the last 15 years, since we have apt-get and aptitude?)

[remi]

@Grunnen I agree. That's something that I see in my work as well: when you try to build a tool that is supposed to replace another one, you won't see complete adoption as long as you let the old one live.

At one point, you have to kill the old one and be ready for the storm of old-time users complaining about missing arcane features (and implement/fix them as needed if possible), and then move one. If you keep the old one around, you'll never have 100% coverage of the old by the new, and you'll keep it around forever.

We are at the point where we have applications for which no one has the source code any more, and we are copying versions that are >10 years old (and dragging along loads of deprecated system libraries) because no one has ever been brave enough to officially kill them...

[RaceProUK]

@remi Are you sure you're not actually talking about Windows? :P

[remi]

@RaceProUK I think I'd know if the software we're developing in-house was Windows... At least it doesn't try to update itself to the newest version when you're in the middle of your workshooting aliens.

[pydsigner]

@flabdablet said in Ubuntu is a fucking trainwreck:

how much of the version number I need to type

None, unless you're doing something clever with pinning.

Unlike RPM repos, where version numbers are actually part of the package name even when there aren't co-existent packages