I'm thinking of moving from Fedora to Debian when Lenny goes stable: Fedora's release schedule leaves me feeling like a rat in a wheel.

Is it still true that one should not mix apt-get and aptitude? And which is most likely to feel user-friendly to an old yum user?

I would stick with aptitude.
There is a nice graphical front-end for package management called Synaptic which is in the Administration section, it is very user friendly.

I would use aptitude from the command line.. http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/.../rn01re01.html

And no you really shouldn't mix the two, you chould choose one or the other and stick with it.

any idea why?

Aptitude and apt-get deal with dependencies differently. Aptitude will automatically remove a program that it thinks was only installed to satisfy a dependency if you remove the dependent package. apt-get will not do this automatically.

There are other differences in the way the programs attempt to resolve dependencies issues. It's best to stick with one or the other. Aptitude is the recommended tool per the Debian documentation, FWIW.

I run aptitude from the command line - I never figured out the graphical front-end.

If you normally use apt-get and then decide to switch to aptitude you MUST issue the command aptitude keep-all as your first command, if you don't do this aptitude may uninstall a whole lot of packages from your system that it thinks you no longer need.. Not a very nice surprise.

I understand apt-get can also handle automatically removing un-needed dependencies, but it is handled in a different way than aptitude does.
apt-get auto-remove


Since Etch was released the Developers have recommended full time use of aptitude.. that's a good enough recommendation for me.

Many people still use apt-get and it works perfectly well.. Look at all the Ubuntu users out there..


Aptitude Command Line HOW-TO
http://pthree.org/2007/08/12/aptitude-vs-apt-get/



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I used apt-get up until it tried to remove libc6, whereas apitude resolved the situation without major damage.

Pentode,
I'm relieved to hear I'm not the only one. I agree 100%.
Another possibility is wajig (my favourite) which also is run from the command line.
Cheers,
jdk

I'm also hard-core as I run FreeBSD and Slackware, that is, I'm completely comfortable at a command prompt with aptitude or apt-get. However, the OP did mention yum/Fedora and that he was looking for something that was user-friendly, hence my suggestion of using Synaptic.
A command prompt or Synaptic will get the job done. Here's a link to the location of Synaptic.

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/...48/whereis.jpg

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

By user-friendly, I meant 'similar to the yum I'm used to'; like you, I do not consider the CLI unfriendly!

Yes. The CLI is a wonderful tool:-)
I think that you will really like Debian. Debian's package management system is second to none (best in the business). You will also notice that your system is a lot faster as you move from Fedora to Debian.