[Suggestion] nala pre-installed in Ubuntu

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1

I would suggest that Ubuntu come with nala pre-installed. Would that be a possibility in the near future?

Quoting the official description:

Nala is a front-end for libapt-pkg. Specifically we interface using the python-apt api.

Especially for newer users it can be hard to understand what apt is trying to do when installing or upgrading.

We aim to solve this by not showing some redundant messages, formatting the packages better, and using color to show specifically what will happen with a package during install, removal, or an upgrade.

The apt is an excellent package manager, but visually it is worse than others used by non-Debian based distros. In addition to the look, other advantages of the nala are:

  • Parallel package downloads.
  • The ability to select the fastest mirrors.
  • Package transaction history.

Useful links:
Official website/repository: https://gitlab.com/volian/nala
Article about nala: https://phoenixnap.com/kb/nala-apt

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They way I learned about it, I think, was searching along the lines of “How to make Ubuntu terminal look like Fedora’s?”.

Simply put, it’s easy to know what you are doing when you can easily see what you are doing.

The concept of good UI and UX shouldn’t be a mystery. Increased productivity and decreased mistakes.

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It’s trivial to download from multiple mirrors in parallel with apt, and it’d be fairly trivial to enable parallel downloading from the same mirror in apt, but: This is a hack.

Let’s be clear about this: APT heavily uses pipelining (10 requests are piled up to the server) and keep-alive connections and the mirror is sending you the packages as fast as it can, or more importantly, wants to.

Using multiple connections to work around server-imposed bandwidth limitations is unfair and creates significant risk that mirrors will just stop mirroring.

It’s on the APT roadmap, the backend is there in /var/log/apt/history.log. Time is limited.

And people expressed severe concerns specifically about Nala’s user experience as it makes it very hard to see what’s going on by hiding important information, compared to apt.

I mean compare the output in the article above, you can clearly see what happened with apt and dpkg when it was installing nala, whereas nala only shows the tail and may hide very important information further up the screen - that’s a no-go. Your terminal window scrolls for you, you don’t need widgets that embed a tail of a log.

I’m not sure the tabular lists with per-package size really make sense, why would you care about which package has which size, and splatter that all over the screen? Again, APT made the choice to give you a concise list of packages for a quick overview, or one package per line with version(s) attached using -V, so that you can clearly see what’s going on.

Nala will not correctly resolve dependencies, they do not understand how to use the apt libraries. Nobody does, it’s very hard to do this correctly.

Recently we experienced with colors in APT to improve user experience which got a significant backslash as people were very unhappy about some of the color choices. It turns out you should not be using colored text output unless you also control the background, as otherwise you may end up printing your yellow text on a yellow background, ugh.

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Thank you for your considerations.

5

Good points, as a simple desktop user I agree and good to know improvements are still considered, experimented on.
I don’t know how Fedora does it, so from the visual aspect, it’s a lot easier to see, follow what is going on. Output looks much more organized.

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Also to add up, nala is not interactive after the installation starts, which I faced recently while installing howdy via their official ppa. @ricardosousa A kind request, if possible to allow

  1. interaction even while installing packages
  2. allow users to increase the number of parallel installations.