Linux Mint Takes To Forking Some APT Components

The Linux Mint project has at times forked various open-source projects to evolve them on their own such as the Cinnamon desktop starting out as forks of several GNOME 3 components. While their software forks and focus has mostly been at the desktop-level, they are going a bit further down the stack now to develop forks of several APT components that power package management on Debian/Ubuntu systems.

Linux Mint published their August 2024 update today and they outline their justification and plans around forking some APT libraries/utilities. Clément Lefèbvre wrote in their status update:

"Some of these APT tools and libraries were written more than a decade ago and are no longer maintained upstream. Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Debian have been patching them throughout the years so they still work, but their design, their translations, the features they provide are stuck in the past. Every Mint release is a reminder of this and a list of long-lasting paper cuts which we’re unable to address.

Because these utilities and libraries are very important to us we decided to simplify how we use them and to maintain them. Going forward we want perfect translations, no more paper cuts and if something we need is missing we’ll just implement it.

Gdebi and apturl were merged into a single utility application called Captain.

Aptdaemon and mintcommon-aptdaemon were merged into a library called Aptkit.

All the tools which previously used Aptdaemon, Synaptic or apturl will now use Aptkit and Captain.

The tools which use Packagekit don’t necessarily need to transition away from it. Packagekit is actively maintained. It doesn’t provide a set of Gtk3 widgets or translations like Aptkit does, but these tools don’t need them.

All in all, this is a lot of work and you as a user won’t really see much difference on your desktop. The paper cuts are gone though and if you find new ones, this time we’ll be able to fix them."

Aptkit and Captain are being developed now via the Linux Mint GitHub.

Learn more about Linux Mint's APT plans and other ongoing work for this popular desktop Linux distribution via the LinuxMint.com blog.