APT or Synaptic
April 12, 2006 – 10:40 pmI noticed that many pages in Ubuntu Wiki Documentation only tell users to apt-get the packages that they need to install in order to do certain things. Ubuntu is an easy to use GNU/Linux Operating System based on Gnome. Ubuntu has easy of use on top of their priority list. But it seems like documentation team has this wrong idea that new Linux or Ubuntu users would find apt-get an easy way to do things. Unfortunately this is not the case. I personally don’t like to use apt-get install when I want to install some package. I prefer to look for it in Synaptic with Multiverse and Universe repositories enabled.
Most windows users who are new to Linux would find anything that involves terminal as a highly advanced and unreliable way to do some thing. They would prefer Synaptic because it has an interface, it shows valueable information about packages before installation and it is easy to use.
Unfortunately, most Ubuntu Wiki Documentation pages do not mention that the packages they are instructing us to apt-get can also be installed using Synaptic. When I was first trying to get media files work on Ubuntu, I failed to apt-get install gstreamer plugins and then I wasted so much time to figure out what media players would work for me. Later I found that I can download all gstreamer plugins using Synaptic.
May be there are some strong reasons behind using apt-get through out the documentation pages but I can not figure them out.
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One Response to “APT or Synaptic”
me too, i think synaptics is very user friendly, i use it most the time where it is easy to search, read informations about packages
i am sure there is someway to do so with apt-get (but don’t know how), but i think its best feature (may be the only one) is that is text based, if you don’t have Xserver, or in most case if you are repairing something
By khaled khalil on Jul 13, 2007