diff --git a/share/functions/__fish_print_apt_packages.fish b/share/functions/__fish_print_apt_packages.fish
index 76c05ef5f..102895b1b 100644
--- a/share/functions/__fish_print_apt_packages.fish
+++ b/share/functions/__fish_print_apt_packages.fish
@@ -13,25 +13,30 @@ function __fish_print_apt_packages
         return 1
     end
 
-    # Do not not use `apt-cache` as it is sometimes inexplicably slow (by multiple orders of magnitude).
     if not set -q _flag_installed
-        awk '
-BEGIN {
-  FS=": "
-}
-
-/^Package/ {
-  pkg=$2
-}
-
-/^Description(-[a-zA-Z]+)?:/ {
-  desc=$2
-  if (index(pkg, "'$search_term'") > 0) {
-    print pkg "\t" desc
-  }
-  pkg="" # Prevent multiple description translations from being printed
-}' </var/lib/dpkg/status
+        # Do not generate the cache as apparently sometimes this is slow.
+        # http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=547550
+        # (It is safe to use `sed -r` here as we are guaranteed to be on a GNU platform
+        # if apt-cache was found.)
+        # Uses the UTF-8/ASCII record separator (0x1A) character.
+        #
+        # Note: This can include "Description:" fields which we need to include,
+        # "Description-en_GB" (or another locale code) fields which we need to include
+        # as well as "Description-md5" fields which we absolutely do *not* want to include
+        # The regex doesn't allow numbers, so unless someone makes a hash algorithm without a number
+        # in the name, we're safe. (yes, this should absolutely have a better format).
+        #
+        # aptitude has options that control the output formatting, but is orders of magnitude slower
+        #
+        # sed could probably do all of the heavy lifting here, but would be even less readable
+        #
+        # The `head -n 500` causes us to stop once we have 500 lines. We do it after the `sed` because
+        # Debian package descriptions can be extremely long and are hard-wrapped: texlive-latex-extra
+        # has about 2700 lines on Debian 11.
+        apt-cache --no-generate show '.*'(commandline -ct)'.*' 2>/dev/null | sed -r '/^(Package|Description-?[a-zA-Z_]*):/!d;s/Package: (.*)/\1\t/g;s/Description-?[^:]*: (.*)/\1\x1a/g' | head -n 2500 | string join "" | string replace --all --regex \x1a+ \n | uniq
+        return 0
     else
+        # Do not not use `apt-cache` as it is sometimes inexplicably slow (by multiple orders of magnitude).
         awk '
 BEGIN {
   FS=": "