an old favorite

Enjoyed the article by M. Hanny Sabbagh, "18 Years Ago, Linux’s Legendary Package Manager Synaptic was Released", which begins with these lines:

"What is the first thing you do after you install Ubuntu or Debian? For me, and literally for almost everybody I met in the Linux world, the first thing is to install Synaptic."

That's exactly what I'd been doing for years with any Debian-based distro I installed, unless the distro shipped with Synaptic by default! I've never really warmed up to any other GUI package manager; always felt that nothing I saw was any better than what I got with Synaptic.

In recent years, I've been doing all of my package management from the command line, so making sure that I've got Synaptic installed isn't the first thing I do anymore. I do like to have it on-hand, even if I don't really use it now; I've learned to get along fine without it. Still, Synaptic remains my favorite GUI package manager.