Arch Linux

violagirl23

Member

Registered: 2008-01-24

Posts: 184

Synaptic

I just wanted to know if this was just me... does anyone else find Synaptic incredibly hard to use? I have tried Ubuntu a couple times now and keep shying away from it and coming right back to Arch, mostly because I can never figure out Synaptic (and also because autoconfig is annoying). Compared to the KISS aspect of pacman, it's really difficult for me to use. I will search for packages in the online repos and they show up, but when I search them in Synaptic they don't.. and I can never figure out what repositories I need. To me it just seemed like a big headache, whereas pacman was a walk in the park. I was just curious if I am the only one who feels this way or if others agree. Anyhow, long live Pacman!

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"You can't just ask to borrow somebody else's lampshade. It's AWKWARD!"

mentallaxative

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2008-07-14

Posts: 134

Website

Re: Synaptic

I just enable multiverse and universe and that's enough for me. I've never found a problem with searching the online repos and not finding it in Synaptic, probably because I find everything in Synaptic that I need...

Acecero

Member

Registered: 2008-06-21

Posts: 1,373

Re: Synaptic

I wouldn't say incredibly hard to use but I can understand why, I didn't particularly enjoy searching packages through synaptic in Debian/Ubuntu either. I used it sometimes to just see if a package existed(and install it) from the repos, it was too slow of a process for me. Rather I used to use the CLI most of the time with 'apt-cache search' and 'apt-get install' to find and install the packages faster.

cyclotomic

Member

From: New York

Registered: 2008-07-08

Posts: 52

Re: Synaptic

I didn't mind it, but it was a little bloated and would get slow if you asked it to do too much at once.  Not to mention that if you tried to look at your install history and minimize that window, then the whole application minimized, that was pretty annoying to me.  It was user friendly though in my opinion.

cardinals_fan

Member

From: /dev/null

Registered: 2008-02-03

Posts: 248

Re: Synaptic

I just used aptitude.

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Segmentation fault (core dumped)

mcmillan

Member

Registered: 2006-04-06

Posts: 737

Re: Synaptic

I didn't mind synaptic when I first started using linux with ubuntu. But once I found Arch I found pacman enough to do just about everything I needed. When I had to use ubuntu again for a little while I tried to use apt instead of synaptic and found it to be a lot more complicated where synaptic was pretty straight forward.

I haven't had the same feeling with pacman gui frontends. Shaman is the first that I find to be as useable as pacman itself and even that I find myself instinctively typing pacman -Ss when I need to look for something instead of pulling up shaman.

whargoul

Member

From: Odense, Denmark

Registered: 2005-04-04

Posts: 546

Re: Synaptic

Well, I have always found Synaptic to be the best GUI frontend to a package manager. But after trying Shaman, Synaptic just seem to be like "Add/Remove" in Ubuntu.

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Arch - It's something refreshing

B-Con

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2007-12-17

Posts: 554

Website

Re: Synaptic

I used to use Ubuntu. It was almost always faster to just use the command line with apt-get / aptitude to get done what I needed done. But from the times that I have used it, I don't remember anything that would make it any less powerful than apt-get.

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- My AUR packages.

freakcode

Member

From: São Paulo - Brazil

Registered: 2007-11-03

Posts: 410

Website

Re: Synaptic

The app (Synaptic) is fine. What I found confusing were all those repositories with no meaningfull name for me at all (universe? multiverse? string theory? OMG)

Zerathidune

Member

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 102

Re: Synaptic

I took me FAR too long to figure out you weren't talking about the touchpad driver. Probably because I'm having touchpad issues...

pelle.k

Member

From: Åre, Sweden (EU)

Registered: 2006-04-30

Posts: 667

Re: Synaptic

Synaptic is nice when you for example search for gstreamer, and wan't to tick a few of the plugins selectively,  because of the overview you get.
I have most apt-* commands aliased, and running stjerm, it's like F12 -> asearch <package>, or F12 -> ainstall <package>, and that takes under 2-3 seconds to do, so synaptic is a bit overkill for the most part.
However, I *can* understand it's comfortable when you're not that used to the command line though...

btw, i have never used anything other than the default repos either. with universe and multiverse you got pretty much everything you want. the "ubuntu-restricted-extras" package is a real timesaver if you're into the non-free stuff. Of course, there's the medibuntu repo, but i never felt i lacked anything without it.

Last edited by pelle.k (2008-08-11 06:38:29)

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"Your beliefs can be like fences that surround you.
You must first see them or you will not even realize that you are not free, simply because you will not see beyond the fences.
They will represent the boundaries of your experience."
SETH / Jane Roberts