I'd say Ubuntu Software Centre was a bigger step anyway.

Posted Oct 11, 2010 10:58 UTC (Mon) by gmatht (guest, #58961)
In reply to: Ubuntu 10.10 released by pranith
Parent article: Ubuntu 10.10 released

When I first tried Debian, RedHat didn't have yum, so apt sounded really promising. However, I was on dialup, and so downloading a package could take a few hours during which the apt database was locked and I couldn't do any other tasks (even query which packages were installed). I decided rpm hell was less annoying than this and went back to Mandrake.

Now I find the ability of the USC to queue package management tasks really nice, even though I have ADSL2+. OTOH, I personally didn't find synaptic that revolutionary, particularly given the similar "adept" package manager came first.

I'd say Ubuntu Software Centre was a bigger step anyway.

Posted Oct 11, 2010 14:19 UTC (Mon) by joey (guest, #328) [Link] (1 responses)

Apt has never, to my knowledge, prevented query operations while a download was in progress. And I used it on dialup for years and still do occasionally.

I may have been using a GUI.

Posted Oct 11, 2010 18:43 UTC (Mon) by gmatht (guest, #58961) [Link]

The most logical way of querying installed packages would have been to use dpkg, which wouldn't be affected by apt-get downloading. Some of the GUIs won't start if they can't get a lock though. In any case, I find queuing quite handy.