 The apt package manager is a very good package manager and it is well used if you use Debian or Ubuntu or anything based on Debian or Ubuntu you use apt and it is well used for a reason. It is one of the best out there and it does its job very well. There's not a lot of negative things that you can say about it. That doesn't mean however that there aren't things that it can approve upon. One of the things that seems to be missing is parallel downloads and when it comes to other package managers that have this it kind of makes apps seem old and slow. So there are developers out there that are trying to improve apt and one of those developers have created a program called Nala. Nala is a front end for apt that does several things very well including adding parallel downloads to the apt system. So what we're going to do today is talk about Nala and by the end of it I think that even if you don't use Debian or Ubuntu you'll find that Nala is just really cool and if you're like me you'll be a little bit jealous over how it looks and how it works. So let's go ahead and look at Nala. So this is the Nala GitLab page and the only criticism I really have of Nala is that their documentation isn't here. So they have installation instructions but all of the syntax and stuff for Nala is going to be found on the man page and you can't find it on their website. So if you are not interested in looking at a man page you're going to be out of luck in terms of knowing how to use this thing. But that's really the only criticism I have. So first let's talk about installations. So if you're using Debian or Ubuntu you can just do sudo apt install Nala and it'll work just fine. If you are on another Debian based distribution that doesn't have it in the repos or doesn't use the default Debian repositories you can install it fairly easily by adding a PPA and those instructions are here and fairly easy to do. You just copy these here and then you copy this one here and then you do this one here. I'm on Linux Mint and those instructions worked fine. I couldn't do the sudo apt install Nala because it wasn't in the repositories there but these three repositories here work just fine. Once it's installed the next question is how to use it and that's where my criticism from a moment ago really comes in because I looked on the wiki here and there's just not anything here in terms of how to use it. So you have to use the man page. So if you do man Nala once it's installed you get this and the syntax is not hard. If you're familiar with apt at all the syntax is mostly the same. The difference comes in is what those commands do. So for example if you use Nala install and then you have it install multiple packages it will install those simultaneously up to three. The Nala remove and the Nala purge do basically the same thing that apt does when you use those same commands but the Nala remove will also auto remove packages that are associated with it. So it will take out dead dependencies and stuff like that. The Nala update and Nala upgrade commands do basically the same thing that you would expect when it comes to updating and upgrading your system. The update will refresh the mirrors. The upgrade will actually install all the updates. So the syntax here is not only very similar to apt but very easy to get a hold of. So let's take a look at what this will do. So first let's install something. Let's install Crusader just for the hell of it. So we will do sudo Nala install and then Crusader like so. And then let's also install something else. So let's just say telegram desktop. Let's see if that's in the repositories. I'm actually sure. So we'll enter here. We'll enter our password and this is what Nala looks like. So as you can see the first thing that is different is that there is a lot of more color coding here than there is an app because app doesn't have any. And there is a little bit more structure to the output. So it's telling you it's installing all these things, the dependencies, and then the things that are suggested that aren't going to be installed or colored differently. And that tells you basically how much space is going to be required to install those things. You hit yes. And then it's going to install this thing. And this you can see is almost completely different than what app will look like. Not only is it installing things simultaneously, but it's not listing them out one by one when it is downloading them. It just has a progress bar, which is really nice. Once you get into the point where it's actually installing things, it does list them out one by one, but it has the progress bar along the bottom and it's color coded and it doesn't continuously scroll. It just, or at least the whole screen, it just scrolls in this little part of the terminal, which is, again, very nice. And as you can see, I'm downloading Crusader. It has a lot of dependencies because it's a KDE project. And it was actually really fast. So one of the criticisms for app is that it's pretty slow. Nala takes care of some of that issue. So we're done. It's installed. So I can actually go to another workspace here and open up Crusader. And here we go. We now have Crusader installed just like so. We have Crusader. Don't judge Crusader based on that look. It's obviously not been themed yet, but it's still just as amazing as it always has been. So that's installing a package. What does updating and upgrading look like? So let's say we wanted to just update the repositories. We don't want to do any upgrades. So we can do pseudo Nala update like so. It's going to usually it will ask for a password. But I've already done that in this session. So as you can see, those repositories and mirrors have already been updated just a few minutes ago when I did an install something different. So there was not a lot here that it would do. But it will also tell you how many packages can be upgraded. So if you want to upgrade, you can do pseudo Nala upgrade. Now, the one thing that's really nice about Nala, other than the things we've already talked about so far, of course, is that when you do apt, you have to do pseudo apt update and an pseudo apt upgrade. You have to do both of those commands in order for your update to work. Because the first one checks if there are updates. The other one updates the things. And with Nala, it combines the two. So I wouldn't have even had to do the Nala update part. If I just do Nala upgrade, it will actually refresh those mirrors and upgrade the system all at once. So if I hit Enter here, you can see that it refreshed the mirrors and then it's going to now update the system. So there are some things that aren't going to be updated. I just hit Yes here. And then it's going to show me all the things that have an update available. I'll hit Yes again. And it looks very similar to installing packages because that's basically what it's doing. It's updating. Right now it's downloading the updates that are available. And then it will install them. And it does so just like it did the packages for Crusader. One of the cool things is that it shows you the speed that it is downloading things at, the size of the package that you're downloading, or the packages that you're downloading, and the time remaining. So if you're downloading something that is really big, like the thing I'm downloading now, it will show you how long you have left for that thing to download. Once it's downloaded all that stuff, it will then update the packages just like so. And just like with all the other scenarios, it has a little progress bar there. And once it's done, it's done. So the benefits of Nala are that it's faster because the parallel downloads, and it gives the app output a lot of color and a few extra very pretty things like the progress bars. And I think, like I said at the beginning, that some of this stuff will make other package managers a little bit jealous. So some of the output here looks a little bit like DNF, so like when we scroll back up here, the output of the packages it's going to install and stuff like that looks a little bit like DNF does minus the color coding. But the progress bars and stuff like that are things that not a lot of other package managers have. And it makes me a little bit jealous. It doesn't really make me want to go start using a Debian or Ubuntu-based distro. It's not quite that awesome, but it's still really nice. So if you do use Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, whatever, I would highly suggest giving Nala a try. It's easy to install, it's easy to use, and it might speed up your update and upgrade process. Hey there, Matt from the feature, just kind of dropping in here because there's something that I forgot to talk about in the video, and that is a command called Nala Fetch. And what this does is it allows you to choose the fastest mirrors closest to you. And honestly, I'd completely forgotten about this because this is the first thing that I ran when I installed Nala when I was testing it out before I started the video. But I figured I needed to show it on camera. So what does Nala Fetch do? So if you run sudo, zoom in here, sudo Nala Fetch, like so, and then enter your password. What it's going to do is it's going to Fetch the Ubuntu mirrors and then rank them. So this will take a little while because it's going to test quite a few mirrors and that will take a little while. Like with the rest of Nala, it has a very nice interface with a progress bar and stuff like that. I wish it would tell you how long it had left to test, but I can understand why that would not be there. Once it's done testing, you'll get this screen here and then you can choose the mirrors that you want to keep. So you would do this by choosing the ones that are closest to you based on score or at least the fastest ones based on score. So in my case, I do one, probably two, probably three, probably four, probably five. And you can choose as many as you want. They're space separated. You could choose all the way up to 16 if you'd like to. And the thing to remember is that you get three parallel downloads per mirror that you use. So each one of these can download three different things at a time. The more you choose, the more parallel downloads you have. I'm not sure if there's a limit or anything like that. I'm not sure about that. But according to the things that I've read, you get three per mirror and it kind of rotates between the mirrors. So it kind of tries to find the fastest way to get the package that it's downloading. So once you hit, once you've selected the mirrors that you want, you hit enter and it'll ask you if you're sure. Hit yes and you're done. And that will make it so that the downloads that you're choosing are coming from the fastest mirrors possible. I would suggest making Nala into an alias. So if you wanted to have something like just use Nala and then the package name, like that you could create a bash alias or a ZSH alias for that. Or if you're really familiar with apt and you kind of have that muscle memory, you could alias apt update, apt upgrade to Nala upgrade, and then it would use Nala instead of apt. So that would allow you to use Nala even if you mistakenly type in apt. So that is definitely something that I'd recommend doing if you're going to use Nala. So that is Nala. And like I said, it is a very good little piece of software. And I think that it has the potential to become very, very popular, very, very fast simply because it does make apt better. And when you create something that makes something else that is already pretty good better, you have a good chance of catching a lot of attention. I know that this has been covered quite a bit. So it's definitely caught the attention of a lot of people. I will leave links to Nala in the video description. If you have comments about Nala or any other things that I've covered in this video, you can leave those in the comment section below. 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