Upgrading to Ubuntu 20, *how* to back up?

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 28 Apr 2020 at 15:23, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:

> I thought apt was a short form of aptitude....

No no.

APT stands for Advanced Package Tool. It is a suite of utilities
invented by Debian for installing and removing software with automatic
dependency resolution. It calls the underlying Debian packaging tool,
`dpkg`.

Apt used to have several sub-commands:
 • apt-get
 • apt-search
 • apt-cache
... as well as the bare `apt` command. It was quite confusing.
Sometimes, if apt could not do exactly what you wanted, it stopped and
asked for guidance -- even if there was only 1 real choice, or one
obviously best choice.

Debian introduced an improved alternative, `aptitude`. Among other
things, it looked harder for solutions, and if there was one obviously
best choice, it did that automatically.

Ubuntu did not adopt aptitude. Instead, Ubuntu improved the `apt`
command, and made just `apt` do what was previously done by apt,
apt-get, apt-cache and others. So, for instance:
apt-get update → apt update
apt-get install foo → apt install foo
apt-cache search bar → apt search bar
apt-get dist-upgrade → apt full-upgrade (less ambiguous; people
thought the former upgraded their whole distro to a new version. It
didn't.)

I believe Debian has now adopted Ubuntu's apt, although I think it
keeps aptitude around too.

TL;DR
Apt is much older than Aptitude. Ubuntu never used Aptitude as standard.

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