Debian 13 Trixie on Apt ver.3

With Debian 13 Trixie becoming the new stable branch, apt has been upgraded to version 3. A lot of much needed and welcomed updates to the UI have made their way into this new version, making it the cleanest that apt has looked. Upgrades from the previous version are:

• Includes better output on the terminal, bringing columned and colorized output to give a more pleasing display to the user.
• Puts warnings towards the end so they are no longer buried in the output.
• Uses a new dependency resolution engine “solver3”, which uses better logic on which packages to install, keep, or remove.

Nala

Available in the Debian repository, Nala is a frontend for apt, and is a fix to some of apt’s longstanding problems. Nala offers a cleaner UI, used colorized outputs before apt even integrated that feature, and tends to overall be a better frontend option for desktop users. Even though Nala has been available before this new upgrade to apt, it still offers improvements over the current version like:

• Better mirror selection with nala fetch, which will ping all Debian repository mirrors and give you a list of mirrors from fastest to slowest, giving you a definitive way to select the fastest choices for your machine.
• Supports parallel downloads like Fedora’s DNF or Arch’s Pacman package managers, so download speeds are much faster than just using apt which utilizes sequential downloads.
• Contains a transaction log, which you can view recent changes done to packages and even use it to roll back updates if needed.
• To update packages, you just need the one command nala update instead of the traditional apt update and apt upgrade, which is a great quality of life feature.

Is Nala a No-Brainer then?

Well, just like anything, it’s not always that cut and dry. Nala isn’t without its own problems, and that’s something you have to consider when adding an additional layer of software: doing so introduces another potential point of failure. This comes into play when considering Nala for other use cases like servers; does this offer enough upside to be warranted?

Most servers would be best advised to get updates from a central machine getting its repository updates from the internet, so mirror selection for speed isn’t as crucial, and the visual upgrades aren’t as crucial when observing servers through a cloud console or in a remote terminal with ssh.

Now for desktop use, the upsides are far greater than the potential downsides, because in this environment you will benefit more from the visual changes Nala provides, and desktop users tend to be more hands on with running manual updates instead of unattended ones, so you can see in real time if an error occurs.

This topic has been played out online before, so it’s nothing new, just like this recent thread on Reddit discussing using Nala. The new update to apt seems to be bringing the topic up again, but the collective thought seems to be equally divided between using Nala and not using Nala. Some users even share Nala breaking or causing issues, so that reaffirms the sentiment I had talked about the paragraph before.

At the end of the day weigh your options and use what’s best for you, because in the true nature of open source, the choice is ultimately yours! If you have experience with Nala, leave a comment and let me know your experience.