When should installing transitional or "real" packages be preferred?
In my case, should I install fonts-ubuntu (real package) or ttf-ubuntu-font-family (transitional package)?
https://askubuntu.com/a/20378/771744 says what they are, and from my reading, says transitional packages should be installed.
https://askubuntu.com/a/1429070/771744 says "Transitional packages are a one-way trip.", which means it will be hard to remove if you don't know the real package name.
Transitional packages are a backwards-compatibility measure. They are provided so that anything that depends on the old package name but actually relied on functionality that's preserved in the new package can continue to work in new versions of Ubuntu. They are kept around only so long - after all, you can't jump over releases when upgrading except from LTS to LTS, so a transitional package only needs to be in one LTS release but not the ones after that. In this case, ttf-ubuntu-fonts-family is already gone in 22.04.
Sometimes you don't have the choice - you're running a script or installing a package from a third party who can't be bothered to update, then the transitional package will have to be installed. But if you do have control, then you should switch to the new package, since you will have to do it anyway with a later Ubuntu version.
