Debian releases APT 3.1!
New day, new release. Debian has just released the first minor version of the APT 3.0 package manager that featured columnar display for listing packages when installing one of them. This improves user experience and makes things more readable than before. According to the official release tracker, this version of the package manager has been submitted to the unstable branch of Debian, which means that it’s only available on unstable versions of Debian for now.
Ubuntu will use this version of APT to bring several improvements to the package manager. The new solver, which was introduced in APT v3.0, is now used in Ubuntu. It introduces the “apt why” and the “apt why-not” commands, which worked similar to their Aptitude counterparts. Those commands give you a report as to why a particular package management decision was taken.
You can also include and exclude packages from a specific repository to limit them. For those who are using dselect, you can now use the HTTPS repositories to download and install packages interactively, all with just a terminal. Finally, APT V3.1 brings general improvements and bug fixes.
Learn more about this new solver here.
Meanwhile, distributions that are Debian-based will take a bit of time to make it to the next version, including Ubuntu 25.10 which will reportedly switch to APT 3.1 from the older 2.x series.