Debian had a much more rigorous packaging policy than Red Hat/Fedora Core early on (the same policy that slows down development and annoys developers today, as you can see in the various recent HN threads) and way more packages in the main repos.

Using RH easily led you into an "rpm hell" of packages from various third-party repos that conflicted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell#Platform-speci...

Now they're both comparable. Yum/dnf are ok, the rpm repos are big. And apt actually has "apt", the tool, that consolidates those separate tools you mention. Before it had aptitude (since at least 2006 or so, I'd say) but it wasn't used much, but now apt is installed by default and you can use it. No more "apt-get", "apt-cache", etc.

So today, nothing makes one of them substantially better, IMO.

apt is a dependency resolver, and both apt-get and aptitude (an alternative implementation) are good at dependency resolution. Pre-yum (so for RHEL before 2007), there wasn't a good dependency resolver on RHEL. yum and dnf have each improved significantly on this, but it's a lot nicer to get the packages you need and know that they're compatible than to find RPMs and install them and see if things work.

As a consequence, Debian packaging policy is (in my experience) a lot more aggressive about using detailed dependency-resolution metadata to establish constraints and define compatibility, which makes for a more annoying developer experience but a nicer end-user experience.

I will one thing: apt pinning[1]. It allows you to tweak the way apt choses the version to install, and allows you through a configuration text file to give higher (or lower) priority to specific releases, repository components, repositories, package names, etc.

I started using it before 2005, before backports was a thing, and it was a lifesaver for my desktops, as I usually wanted to use newer versions from testing or unstable.

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch02.en....

> I really want to know what are the things that make apt better?

For apt as a format probably not so much anymore. For the Debian apt repositories it's the several thousand capable and driven maintainers.