I think most of us are familiar with the way that APT, the package management tool underpinning Ubuntu and all other Debian-based Linux distributions, looks and behaves.

Don’t want to wait?
Nala is a Nicer, Faster Frontend for Apt

But some (much needed) visual changes are coming in the next major stable release, APT 3.0 — and they look great.

Hey, don’t pretend you’re not excited by fancier looking APT print outs, my friend! 🤭

One of the (many) things I love about Fedora is how clean, ordered, and legible DNF printout looks — no, i’m not sure “printout” is the right term for what I mean but saying it makes me feel like I’m part of the 1980s BBC TV series The Computer Programme so I’m rolling with it for vibes.

Whether I’m checking for updates, removing things, or upgrading packages I feel more aware of what’s happening (or about to happen) in DNF than in APT — not that APT’s output lacks anything, but I don’t find this (below) very glanceable:

Dense: This is APT as we know it

It requires reading what’s on screen which, in 2024, is positively archaic (yes, sarcasm).

Indeed, I fell foul of the dense readout during the noble cycle. Ubuntu developers made major package transitions and rebuilds that led to a mix/mess of versions and conflicts. In those throes running apt upgrade sans attention would leave you without a desktop to log in to!

Now, all of the apt info was shown to me but the text is the same colour (white); all the lines stacked together densely; the “packages to be removed” section sat further up the screen (out of view) than the “packages to be upgraded” section…

I assumed it was fine, hit y and c’est la vie-ffs 🤦🏻‍♂️.

Anyway, APT 3.0 revamps its UI — and I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a BIG improvement: –

APT 3.0 new colour UI
Ordered: This is APT 2.9 (to be 3.0 on release)

Per the release announcement for the APT 2.9 dev release, the package manager UI now has “colors, columnar display, some more padding, and shows removals last” — changes would spare inattentive impulsive command bashers like moi a rouge-face post reboot.

No idea why I’m mangling the French language so badly in this post. Can someone run sudo apt purge joey-langpack-fr for me? Maybe re-install English while you’re at it, eh?

This UI change closes a bug report first opened in 2014.

Anyway, keep an eye out for this when Ubuntu 24.10 rolls out in the autumn. Assuming I’ve got my schedules lined up correctly in my head APT 3.0 will almost certainly feature.

Or, if you’re dying to try it out, you could do what I did: install Debian Bookworm, edit the sources.list to point to unstable, upgrade apt, and then run lots of different commands to see how things now look. I have too much time on my hands, I know.