Finally! The New UI for APT Adds a Splash of Color to Improve Readability
Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) is a very popular package manager found on Debian, and other popular Linux distros based on it. It is used to manage all the packages on a Linux system and to also install new ones, such as applications, command-line tools, etc.
Though, many users don't like how APT presents information when running commands. Hence, some switch to tools like Nala, which is like APT but better at presenting information while also offering cool features like parallel downloads, an easy-to-use interface, and more.
Introduced a few days back in a very low-key manner, APT 2.9 (unstable) was released with an updated user interface that now sports colors, displays information in padded columns, and an organized package removals list.
This also marks the beginning of the APT 3.0 development series, which will surely feature extra refinements and upgrades to make this widely used package manager more potent.
When I tried installing GIMP using APT 2.9, all the information was arranged quite neatly, and I never got confused as to which packages were being added; the columns and colors helped too.
