apt-get

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2008–2026), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with apt-get, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 10 complaints

Update process halts on irrelevant full-screen questions the user must answer2026-11-02
Key install-without-upgrade behaviour is buried in obscure man page options2025-11-05
Apt-get hangs about 30 seconds trying IPv6 before falling back to IPv42020-10-20
Package upgrades repeatedly prompt users to diff and merge rc.d runscripts they never wrote2020-08-25
Package name changes need manual intervention even when the rest of the update is automatic2019-01-23
Apt-get stalls waiting for HTTP headers during package fetches2017-03-31
Installing a package named like a subcommand, such as remove, is ambiguous and fails confusingly2016-03-05
Took weeks to figure out creating a repo; docs omit half the process2014-01-08
Regular users find running apt-get too cumbersome to install software2012-03-17
No message or docs after install say what to do next or where the software is2008-12-05