“Debian users have always boasted that their Advanced Package
Tool (APT) was the best and fastest way there has ever been to
install and delete software. They were right, except for two
details: First, many computer users are scared of the command
line–and APT is a command line utility. Second, even for users not
afraid of the command line, setting download repositories and other
parameters was not easy unless you spent enough of your time
administering computers to remember all the text commands it took
to make APT do what you wanted. Then came Synaptic, which promised
to make Debian software installs GUI-friendly. Not long after that
came a version of Synaptic that didn’t crash every time I tried to
use it. And finally, in late 2004, Synaptic became so lovable that
I would no longer want to have a desktop computer without
it…”