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Don't know. But I have never used aptitude and don't seem to miss it. People say that aptitude is greater, but "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". So I keep using apt-get, though maybe I should use aptitude.

I think apt-get is easier than aptitude, however that's a subjective matter, just like fdisk vs cfdisk (I like fdisk)

I like cfdisk

Less calculation to do in order to hit cylinder boundaries, and nicer looking UI.

I think apt-get is easier than aptitude

That doesn't make any sense. Aptitude's UI is a subset of apt-get's. Just replace "apt-get" with "aptitude", IOW: aptitude update; aptitude install hello (etc).

Of course, Aptitude also has a curses-based UI and other stuff, but you can ignore all of that if you don't need it.

I think aptitude is the recommended option. It has more sophisticated problem-solving options. But personally I find the interface enough to induce psychosis and stick to apt and if I need it synaptic where possible. Out of the box, aptitude also treats recommended packages as dependencies, I think. This means that mixing apt and aptitude together can produce different results and probably isn't a good idea.

There are a couple of other nice things about apt on Debian, like apt listbugs, so you can check first whether you want to install potentially borked packages on Testing or Unstable. All over, it's very thorough.

The other half of the story, I think, is the very good packaging of Debian files that lies behind apt. I also run apt on SuSE but I wouldn't feel so confident about doing a big apt-get upgrade there. On Debian I can feel confident that the whole process will run smooth as butter.

Certainly you can use apt on other distros, however in my experience the repositories are much slimmer and the package inter-dependencies less well thought out (and more prone to conflicts)

Aahh.. the conflicts.. the reason why I shifted to LFS after having considered FreeBSD and Gentoo (which is my system today - it's LFS with cheats enabled )

On Fedora you can use SmartPM instead, which efficiently solves most of the conflicts you're bound to meet with that distro. Oh, I really hated those conflicts.

I do recall back in the day when I used to mix packages from Stable/Testing/Unstable (plus a few third party repositories) that now and then I had to use the --force, but after moving entirely to Unstable (and only a single third party repository) about three and half years ago, I've have not had to invoke it since.

Well, in fact it doesn't happen very often, and certainly a lot less often than in the past.
As to using Unstable only, Sid has been in a total mess a couple of times in the last 6 month. So I still prefer to use mixed repos, pinned to Testing.

You are experiencing poorly designed packages. Good packages use something called diversions to get around this. Basically they move the file out of the way, and let the system know they did this.

Because aptitude will remember what packages were installed as dependencies for a specific package, so that when you remove said package, everything that was installed as a dependency will be removed along with it. apt-get does not do this. Aptitude is also much better at solving conflicts -- it knows what to remove/install to make things work (most of the time)

Besides, there is no learning how to use aptitude if you already know apt-get -- just replace apt-get by the word aptitude in your commands

aptitude update
aptitude upgrade
aptitude install whatever

That (debconf) is another great Debian feature which people often forget, whilst everybody knows about apt.