List packages by section, status (installed), origin or more.Search for packages by name, description, maintainer, version, dependencies etc.Here is a summary of what you can do with Synaptic: Synaptic is also one of the lightweight applications you can use in Ubuntu to speed up your system a bit. It’s slow to load, it’s slow when searching for software and it is full of snap application (that not everyone prefers). Remember, it is basically GUI front end to apt which means it can do (almost) everything you do with apt commands in the terminal.įor example, if you want to prevent the update of a specific package in Ubuntu, you can do that in Synaptic but not in GNOME/Ubuntu Software Center.Īlso, I have noticed some issues with the Software Center in Ubuntu 20.04. Not most of the time, of course.īut Synaptic is still a lot versatile than the likes of GNOME Software.

Why would you use an ‘ancient’ software like Synaptic package manager? These software managers have better interface, display the package information in a more friendly way with thumbnails, ratings and reviews.Įventually, Synaptic got confined to mostly lightweight Linux distributions. Things changed as modern software manager tools like GNOME Software and KDE Discover came up with more modern and intuitive UI. It was considered to be a user-friendly, easy to use way of managing applications.

There was a time when Synaptic was the default graphical software manager on almost all Debian-based Linux distributions. Synaptic is a lightweight GUI front end to apt package management system used in Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and many other Debian/Ubuntu based distributions.īasically, everything that you can do using the apt-get commands in the terminal can be achieved with Synaptic. Learn what this good old package manager can do that the modern software managers cannot. This week’s open source software highlight is Synaptic.

Ubuntu virtualbox task manager