I have both Kpackage and Synaptic, and would like to dump one to keep my system minimalist. Which do you recommend I keep? I lean toward Synaptic, simply because I am more familiar with it.

Or you can dump both Try Adept - pretty similar to Synaptic but KDE-orientated. I like both. It also depends which of these tools are well integrated with your distro. The reason that Kpackage doesn't seem to be used by that many people is that there aren't many distros that utilize it and integrate it tightly into their environment.

I recommend Synaptic. I hate Adept. While we're on the subject I hate Dolphin too.

stress_junkie, how are Synaptic and Adept so massively different to produce such a range of feelings? (and may I note "I hate Dolphin" is so NOT on the subject)

Synaptic: clean, simple interface; understandable progress messages
Adept: cluttered mysterious interface; no progress messages; no indication of what was done

The dolphin comment was tied to this dialog by way of the common theme of my preferences for similar functioning software and new versus old and the moral imperative to denounce the newer and less functional "replacement" for perfectly good original software. Moral imperative.

Well, I do love Adept's dynamic search (as opposed to Synaptic's pop-up box). What I don't like in Adept is those sliding "arrows" you have to press to see more info on a package. Synaptic is definitely better here. "no progress messages; no indication of what was done" - that's not strictly true - if you want to see console output just press "show details" button.

And for the record - I don't use any of the above - I use a wonderful combination of Yakuake and apt!

P.S. Coming back to Dolphin issue - I adore and extensively use Konqueror both in KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.1 but when it comes to straightforward file management Dolphin (the one in 4.1 not 3.5) is simply amazing! This is, however, a subject for another thread.

Well, in light of these responses, I'll keep Synaptic and dump Kpackage.

I wanted to just put a happy face but that response is too short to be accepted by this site.



There we are.

Adept, kpackage and synaptic are all a pain in the butt, when you go further than installing one or two package, especially the dependency handling of synaptic is totally crappy.

Use aptitude and you get a clean ncurses-Interface, incremental search and a decent dependency handling (if you turn off recommendation=dependency)