How good is apt-get really? Is it a panacea or smoke and mirrors?

I am revisiting Linux after three years with Win2K and have tried RH9 and MDK9. Installation is no problem. The trouble begins when I try to update the buggy, two-year-old version of an app that comes on the distro CD to the current version. I have killed several days and nights with rpm and KPackage chasing dependencies and trying to install things that depend on themselves. Is apt-get the cure for all this?

<conspiracy theorist>I think RH is in cahoots with Bill Gates who probably owns a majority stake in RH anyway. I think rpm was really developed at Microsoft to kill off Linux. People think rpm is a package manager. Not true! It is a dependency list generator, nothing more, nothing less. It uses randomly-selected strings in listing dependencies. Well it's working because I have already wiped RH and MDK off my drive thanks entirely to rpm. I tried installing apt-get on MDK and was unable to because I couldn't resolve the DEPENDENCIES!</conspiracy theorist>

Bummer. Coming from a debian user - where apt-get is installed standard - apt-get rocks. Upgrading has never been simpler.

You can't compare apt and rpm.

The equivalent on a debian system for rpm would be dpkg. Apt is a package manager backend which can itself resolve dependencies, acquire (e.g. download) and install packages and even keep them up to date. RPM probably can do the acquire part of that (rpm -i http://.../pack.rpm). Apt can also perform simple queries on the database of available packages.

If you really want to feel the power of apt you can even use one of its frontends, aptitude or synaptic, with the power of apt and the ease of kpackage.

I have apt-get for red hat and it rocks.Just got to learn it better.

I have apt-get for redhat as well and it is really good. It has made installing software easy as a command or two. I would recommend it.

Apt-get for RH is awesome and saves so much time and hassle. Installing and upgrading packages is so very very easy now. Synaptic is also a great package - no more dependency hell for me.

Which would people rather have, Red Hat with apt-get or Debian with apt-get? Why?

This assumes one could even get apt-get installed on Red Hat. I doubt I would be able to.

i'd rather have suse + apt/synaptic. but given the choice of deb or redhat it would be debian.

apt-get is the best thing to happen to linux since...since i don't know when. it totally rules. try installing it on red hat, then sit back and enjoy.

Does suse come with apt? If not, would I be able to get apt running on suse or would it be a journey to dependency hell?

it doesn't come with it, but it's available here. http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/

Have you been able to successfully install apt on suse? I'm once burnt, twice shy with installing or upgrading ANYTHING on Linux any more. Too many hours spent in dependency hell.

yep, run it on my laptop and home machine.

Apt-get/synaptic out shines the RPM handler that comes with RH 9, easy to upgrade and find and remove packages I would suggest it for anybody who has been through dependency hell

Why are so many using Redhat and apt? Why not use Debian?
If it is due to the ease of installation of RedHat - try Knoppix or Morphix. If it is due to something other than installation - where Debain is hopeless what is it?