Is aptitude still considered superior to apt-get?

As far as I can see, in 10.04, the main differences between aptitude and apt-get are:

1. aptitude adds explicit per-package flags, indicating whether a package was automatically installed to satisfy a dependency: you can manipulate those flags (aptitude markauto or aptitude unmarkauto) to change the way aptitude treats the package.

   apt-get keeps track of the same information, but will not show it explicitly. apt-mark can be used for manipulating the flags.

2. aptitude will offer to remove unused packages each time you remove an installed package, whereas apt-get will only do that if explicitly asked to with apt-get autoremove or specify --auto-remove.

3. aptitude acts as a single command-line front-end to most of the functionalities in both apt-get and apt-cache. Note: As of 16.04, there is an apt command that includes the most commonly used commands from apt-get and apt-cache and a few extra features.

4. In contrast to apt-cache's "search", aptitude's "search" output also shows the installed/removed/purged status of a package (plus aptitude's own status flags). Also, the "install" output marks which packages are being installed to satisfy a dependency, and which are being removed because unused.

5. aptitude has a (text-only) interactive UI.

I personally use only aptitude for my command-line package management (and I never use the text UI); I find its output more readable than apt-get/apt-cache.

However, if aptitude will be no longer standard on Ubuntu, there's no other choice than use apt-get in instructions and how-to documents.

(Personally, I'm rather disappointed to see it go away in 10.10; especially since the improvements of aptitude over apt-get are mostly on the usability side. I guess they deemed that those conversant with the command-line know how to get aptitude back, and those who don't use the command-line will not care...)

I guess it's a matter of personal choice by now. I find typing aptitude search makes more sense to me than apt-cache search, and I like that it tells me which packages I have installed right there in the search output, instead of having to run dpkg -l.

Earlier apt-get would not manage dependencies properly and therefore cause orphaned dependencies to remain in a system even after the package that was using them was uninstalled - this is not longer the case, to remove orphaned dependencies use

sudo apt-get autoremove

aptitude always did this right and tracks dependencies better, but now both package managers do the job.

On ubuntu it is better to use apt-get because its supported and endorsed by the company, on debian I would use aptitude