I was recently looking for an alternative to using APT on Ubuntu. It turns out there is one: it’s called nala. Nala is a package manager designed to serve as a replacement or an improved option over APT.

nala

This tool brings a better user experience by enhancing the readability of output, providing faster dependency resolution, and adding additional features for managing packages.

Nala is a free, open source alternative front-end to APT (which itself is something of a front-end to dpkg). Nala does (almost) everything APT does (which you’d hope given it’s just a front-end to it) plus it can do a bit more.

Nala is compatible with most of the apt commands we’re all familiar with. To run them just replace apt with nala, e.g, sudo nala update.

nala

And Nala‘s extra features I touched on? Run nala --help to discover them — but here’s a short rundown of my favourites:

• sudo nala fetch – find fastest mirrors
• nala history – see recently run nala commands
• nala history info – see more details about a history event

But not every APT command works in Nala.

nala

You can’t run an: nala dist-upgrade or nala full-upgrade, or view critical bugs using: nala-listbugs. There are likely more omissions so my tip is this: try anyway. If it’s supported, it’ll work, if it’s not, just use apt for that particular task.

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Reference:

1. nala
2. Official Ubuntu Documentation