@piper, I should have re-worded my post to say I like aptitude better, not that apt-get is better.
You have been around long enough here and dslr for me to know you are smart enough to see that the different options in aptitude are self explanitory.
Things I notice are the posts of folks using aptitude complaining about removal of unused pakages and other things that can easily be stopped via the options in aptitude.
For me, I like that you can use the ncurses (terminal menu) interface to prepare complex package operations like partial upgrade, remove one package, freeze another one, upgrade this one, that you can then execute in a single operation.
The apt-cache and regular apt-get commands can be used in aptitude as it is a front-end to apt-get.
Conflict resolution is a good thing if taken with a grain of salt. It can be handy to get an idea what is holding things up, breaking something or what have you where with apt-get, you are on your own to figure these out.....better for a newb imo.
Aptitude remembers which packages were explicitly requested and which were only installed due to dependencies.
One might want to know why an automatically installed package is present on the system. To get this information from the command-line, you can use aptitude why package (apt-get has no similar feature):
$ aptitude why python-debian
i aptitude Recommends apt-xapian-index
i A apt-xapian-index Depends python-debian (>= 0.1.15)
(from debian handbook)
I remember aptitude not reading apt/preferences (a bug that may be fixed now) and being able to read apt/pinning.
I know apt-get does these as well.
Also, myself, I use aptitude commands via terminal instead of curses version.
I also like the aptitude search funtion showing pakages as being installed or not or broken where apt-cache search doesn't.
Just a preference for me is all.
