Can it cause problems to switch from apt-get to aptitude?

"apt-get and aptitude are different UIs that are part of the same package management system, APT, the Advanced Packaging Tool. For instance, both are configured using /etc/apt/apt.conf, both use the same filespace and formats to represent package state, and the same filespace to store downloaded .debs.

How they differ is their internal rule system to represent potential conflicts between package, how to resolve them (say during apt-get dist-upgrade vs. aptitude full-upgrade), and how to express these when interacting with the user. Generally speaking, both might do the wrong thing in tricky situations, but apt-get is much more likely to get it wrong than aptitude."

It was said on the Debian mailing list, years ago, that switching from apt-get to aptitude was risky. This is two Debian versions (say 10 years) ago. All those problems seem to be worked out now, and certainly I haven't seen problems on either Debian or Ubuntu.

"From my experience, they have a different way of pinning package versions. In my case, I told aptitude to lock certain packages, assuming I'd be safe from future updates. I was wrong; the cron-scheduled update manager, which uses apt-get, proceeds to upgrade it to my dismay.

Drats, as I was writing this, I googled and found out that the bug (#557580 aptitude does not obey pins in preferences.d/*) was already fixed!"

"I use both apt-get and aptitude without any problem: I have the same question...Why do people say this??? :D

Go on, and don't worry: aptitude is just a text-gui for apt-get, that you could even use as a command line application, for example apt-get install foo is the same as aptitude install foo.

Regards"