Aptitude

Raised as a usability problem by 9 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with Aptitude, 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 9 complaints

During upgrades it gets lost searching and needs manual help to find a solution2026-08-13
TUIs like aptitude and git's merge tool are non-intuitive and hard to explore2026-05-04
Commenter repeatedly forgets how the interface works and finds it unintuitive2025-10-20
Commcommander forgets how aptitude's interface works; finds it unintuitive2025-10-20
Frequent waits of over a second when using aptitude, even on a fast desktop2024-03-18
Package search returns cluttered library results with rarely any descriptions2023-11-05
Package manager spits out broken dependencies every time the distro is upgraded2018-11-17
Has about eight binaries doing essentially the same thing, and search output breaks when piped to grep2016-04-13
Search matches any term by default (OR), not all terms, making results unusable2012-01-26