 If I had to guess at a number, I would say probably more than 90% of desktop Linux users run a Debian-based or an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution. That family of distributions includes things like Debian and Ubuntu and Linux Mint and Elementary and MX Linux and, you know, many of the very popular desktop Linux distributions are based on Debian. Debian is a fantastic Linux distribution and that's why it makes such a good base to base other distributions off of it. It has a ton of packages in its repositories, so you can find most of the software you're looking for. You can probably find it in the Debian repositories, but one of the things I have a problem with with most of these Debian-based Linux distributions is the graphical package managers that they're shipping with these days. None of them are very good, in my opinion, and today I wanted to share with you guys is a much better graphical package manager for your Debian-based or your Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, and that program is called the Synaptic Package Manager. Let me switch over to my desktop and I'm going to fire up a virtual machine of Ubuntu here, so I've got a VM of Ubuntu 2104 and let's show the differences of some of these modern GUI software centers compared to the one I'm going to show you as a better alternative. Let me fire up Ubuntu Software Center. This is a graphical software center. It has a lot of bells and whistles to it, and this is, even though I'm showing you Ubuntu Software Center, GNOME Software is the same. It's essentially what Ubuntu is using, the GNOME Software Center, Kubuntu, and a lot of the KDE distros are going to use KDE's Discover Software Center. Linux Mint, of course, has its software manager. Everybody's got something different, but at the same time they're all kind of trying to mimic these mobile app stores, and that's the new modern interface they're all trying to be. They're trying to be Apple's app store, so you get logos for the programs, you get screenshots of the programs, you get user reviews, you get user ratings, you know, one star through five stars, and it slows these package managers. Now, sometimes the pages take forever to load, especially if there's a lot of images on the page, and it's all, for the most part, useless information that most of the time you don't need. For example, what do you typically open up a package manager for desktop Linux? You know, why do you do that? Typically, people are doing that most of the time to update the system. And to update the system, I don't want all these graphics to load and everything. I just want to click, hey, update my system, and boom, it starts updating the system. This is pointless, you know, information for stuff like that. Also, installing and removing software. I don't need screenshots of programs while I'm removing programs, right? I don't need user reviews of a program I'm removing, either ratings. And most of the time, I don't need that information for installing software either because 99% of the time when you're installing a program, you know exactly what you're going to install, right? You know the name of the program, you're just going to go ahead and fire up your software center and do a search for that program and click install. You don't need a screenshot. You don't need user reviews. You don't need any of this stuff. And I know we're all trying to be slick and modern and, you know, we're trying to, we're trying to mimic other operating systems. But before everybody started trying to mimic these mobile app stores, Linux actually had a very nice GUI package manager for Debian and Debian based systems. And that was the Synaptic package manager because it was very, very powerful. Let me fire up Synaptic so you guys can see it. Of course, you have to give it a root or sudo password. You do need sudo privileges to use Synaptic because you have to have sudo privileges to install or remove software on a Linux system. One of the things I love about the Synaptic package manager is just how clean it looks because it's all text and everything is fast and peppy. When you do a search for something, you get it instantly. It's almost like doing these things in a terminal, you know, at the command line, the difference is you have a GUI interface. You have different panes of windows here. So you get a little bit more information put in front of you at one time than what you would do doing a lot of this stuff at the command line. So let's talk about some of the columns of information you have here. So this on the far left, these are sections. And you see sections down here is highlighted. That is what this is. It's basically your categories of software. Right now, the default is clicked on all that's showing all the packages available in the Ubuntu repositories. And of course, it's going to be a massively long list of thousands and thousands of packages, but you can narrow down this search. Basically, if I wanted to click on amateur radio, that particular category, I get amateur radio related packages or cross platform. Or if I wanted to, I could scroll down and look for fonts that are available here in Ubuntu, or there's a Haskell programming language categories of various Haskell related programs and libraries. Now, if you didn't want to have these sections, the categories basically here, what you could do is you could click on status and you could also do some filtering by the status of the packages, whether they the packages that are being displayed here are packages currently installed. So if I click installed, these are showing all the packages currently installed on the system or packages that are not installed or all the packages, whether they're installed or not. You can also filter by origin. This is not something most people are going to want to do. This is mainly different repositories. You also have custom filters here, whether the package is marked as broken. Doesn't look like there's any broken packages right now, at least none that are marked here in Ubuntu. You also have search results. And we'll get to search here in a second. We also have architecture, whether you want 64-bit applications or 32-bit applications or all. Already in just the couple of minutes that I've shown you this one pane of information here, this set of filters in Synaptic, it already blows away whatever graphical package manager came installed by default on your Debian or Ubuntu-based system, right? Let me go back to the Ubuntu software center. You know, it didn't have any of that information, right? It's a very simple interface. There's only three buttons at the top. Explore, which is your search button, basically installed. List the installed packages. Updates, list the updates available. You do have a menu system here, but for a sign-in, you actually have to have an account to do anything there. Yeah, so I mean, there's not much you can do here compared to the possibilities are endless, what you can do with Synaptic. Synaptic basically tries to be everything that you can possibly do with the apt package manager, as far as the command line, apt package manager, synaptic package manager is trying to do all of those things in a GUI, a graphical way. For example, if you wanted to search for a program at the command line using the apt package manager, you would do apt search name of program. Well, Synaptic does the same thing. It's just, it saves you the trouble of having to go to a terminal and type apt search name of program. You just click the search button and then type the name of program you wanna search for. I'll search for Firefox. And basically that is just a graphical front end of doing apt search Firefox. You get the same information, it's just presented to you in a slightly different format than the way it would be in the terminal. And you see, I get all the packages that were either Firefox was part of the name or Firefox was part of the description. Also, you will notice that you have this column here where the boxes are either white or green. Green means that package is currently installed. So this package here named Firefox, Firefox of course is installed by default on Ubuntu and that's why that box is green. Now let me search for something that I know is not installed out of the box on Ubuntu. So I'm gonna search for Emacs. And here in a second, we're gonna get a list of all the packages that either have Emacs as part of the name or as part of their description. I'm gonna use the scroll bar and go down until I find Emacs, the one I want. It's just the standard Emacs package right there. And then once I have that, what you could do is you could right click and then you could mark the package for installation and it tells me exactly what's gonna be installed because Emacs has some dependencies. So it's gonna tell me it's gonna install Emacs plus these other packages. And then click mark and it marks Emacs and all those dependencies that it needs to install. And we're gonna install all of these once you click apply. But maybe I'm not done yet. So maybe I wanna go search for something else. Maybe I wanna remove a piece of software while I'm at it. I know Htop was installed. So let's do a quick search for that. And then you see Htop, the box is green meaning it's installed. I'm gonna right click on it and I'm gonna mark for removal. Now you have two options for removal. Mark for removal and mark for complete removal. What this does is if you mark something for removal it just removes the program. It doesn't remove any configuration files that may still be laying around on the system that that program uses. Why does it not delete the configuration file? Because maybe you did a custom configuration file for Htop and maybe later you'll install it again. It's nice to still have your custom configuration still on the system. But a lot of people don't want those config files hanging out on the system for a program you removed. So you might wanna mark it for complete removal. That deletes Htop and any configuration files that were also on the system for Htop. And now that I've done that all I need to do is click apply and all the changes we've made are gonna be put into effect. So it's gonna tell me, hey, it's gonna completely remove this. It's going to install all of these. And then unchanged is all the packages that are on the system that have an update available but for whatever reason I haven't marked them to be updated. So I'm just gonna go ahead and click apply. It's gonna install Emacs and all its dependencies. It's gonna remove Htop, including the configuration files for Htop. And you see changes were applied and automatically closed after the changes have been applied. I'm just gonna click okay on that. And then this left-hand pane, we are on the search results. And you can see we've searched for Emacs, Firefox and Htop. Gonna go ahead and go back to the default look which is the sections, the categories look. Now there were a few packages that needed upgrading that we didn't upgrade the first time. So this time I'm gonna click mark all upgrades. And yeah, these are the packages that need to be upgraded. So those were in the list before it was warning me, hey, these could be upgraded but you haven't marked them yet. So now I've marked them. Well, I click mark. Now I hit apply and apply again and it's gonna upgrade those packages. And the upgrading has completed. Now one of the reasons Synaptic has so much to it, you know, has so many options available to it. Why it's such a powerful utility is Synaptic package manager is quite old. It's been around forever on Debian and Ubuntu-based systems. Matter of fact, Synaptic package manager used to be the default package manager, the graphical package manager that was installed on Debian and Ubuntu and systems like that. But for whatever reason, these distributions kinda got away from Synaptic. And I know why these days, people want to present especially new users with less options. They want something that just has a handful of options. You know, you can't really get confused by it. I guess Synaptic could be confusing to the new user but really honestly, it's very intuitive because all of the common operations such as installing and removing software are very straightforward, right? You don't have to look around for them searching for software, you gotta search button here, right? It's all right there for you. So the really confusing stuff, you would actually have to go out of your way to search for it. If you go into the settings menu here and you go into preferences, I mean, you can really configure the graphical settings and everything. I mean, you can adjust the fonts. You can adjust some of the information that is displayed in the columns. You go to columns and fonts. You can tick on and off certain things here. You can play with the colors. You can also set settings as far as the cache. You know, when does it need to delete the cache? You also have a distribution tab here although it warns you that you really shouldn't play with this. So don't, you know, be careful in the advanced settings. Typically, you don't wanna play with stuff unless you have a reason to and you really know what you're doing. For example, there's also the repositories settings here and this is all the repositories. Where is it pulling packages down from? Well, it's pulling it from the canonical, supported, free and open source software, the main repository for Ubuntu and the universe repository for Ubuntu. It's also pulling down stuff from the restricted repository for Ubuntu. Now the restricted repository is important to have turned on because especially if you need proprietary drivers, proprietary Wi-Fi drivers, especially on your laptops or proprietary graphics drivers for those of you that are using NVIDIA graphics cards, especially, you know, make sure that you have that ticked on. Typically you tick that on during the install process for Ubuntu. Also you have other software, this tab here's where you can tick on some extra repositories. You also have updates. These are settings for setting things like how often do you want Ubuntu to check for updates? You can automatically check for updates daily, every two days, weekly, whatever it is you wanna set it to. One of the most important tabs is this additional drivers tab and it's gonna search for proprietary drivers if they're needed for your hardware, on my hardware it's not needed because I'm in a virtual machine and the drivers, the graphics drivers for the virtual machine are open sourced. So let me close all of that out. So that's just a little bit of what you can do with the Synaptic Package Manager. Again, I think by far the best GUI Package Manager available on any Debian based system and it's not even close. I've never liked any of the new app stores. You know, the software centers that a lot of the Linux distributions these days are shipping with but Synaptic, I actually quite like Synaptic because it's very similar to the look and feel and the power and flexibility of using apt at the command line. It's just in a graphical form but it doesn't hide all the functionality of the apt package manager. Everything you can do with apt, you can do in Synaptic and that's not the case in the standard software centers. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Apsi gave James Mitchell, Paul West, Olaf, Akami, Alan, Chuck, Kurt, David, Dillon, Gregory, Heiko, Erjan, Alexander, Peace, Arch, Infador, Polytech, Raver, Scott, Steven, Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode that you had just watched, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because it's just me and you guys, the community, right? If you guys like what I do, wanna support my work, please consider subscribing to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.