Last April, my partner Diego he advanced us that Ubuntu 24.10 would use a new version of APT, acronym for Advanced Packaging Tool, with a renewed interface. These changes will also reach other distributions, such as Debian, and can already be used in the Daily Build of Oracular Oriole, among others. Although it currently appears as version 2.9.6, it seems clear that we are looking at what will be the APT 3 that we will use from October onwards, and the improvements are considerable.
In the Noble Numbat current and other distributions with the current APT, the information is not presented in the best way. For example, if we write sudo apt install vlc To install the famous player, what we see is the following screenshot: a list with all the packages to install and then a little information about the space it will occupy.
APT 3 shows clearer information
On the other hand, if we put the same command in Ubuntu 24.10, currently in development, what we will see will be this:
Isn't it much better this way with clearer information? If we go back to the top, we will see that the name of the package to be installed appears in green, the same color as the dependencies that will also be installed. Also in columns is a list with suggested packages, and then a summary of what you are going to do: in this case, 0 packages will be updated, 117 will be installed, 0 will be removed and 0 others will not be updated; The download size will be 77.5MB, the required space will be 287MB and the available space that I have in my virtual machine is 21.6GB.
While installing, it looks more or less the same, but the bar has changed from pads to a white one:
And the following images show what we will see when uninstalling a package and running autoremove:
On the other hand, there is also more text in Spanish, but I can say little more about it. Probably in the future everything will be in our language.
Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole will arrive this October with this and other new features, such as a new kernel and new desktops. For those of us who prefer to manage packages from the terminal, even sometimes, we will see it better and clearer.