Synaptic does work, and work well. I like Kubuntu’s treatment of KDE better though. I think Adept has much work still to be done to it, but it’s certainly making its way towards the functionality and stability that folks now enjoy with Synaptic.

before the flame wars start, let me mention that I am not a fanboy of any camp and my 1st 2 yrs in Linux were on KDE… but with *buntu, Gnome simply works…. and works astoundingly well

That’s why for people who are less familiar and less interested with adept manager, I recommend the use of adept installer (see 2 of ? for a write-up on that).

I agree that there is still work to be done on adept. There’s still development being done on it. Problems are being sorted out, it’s just that these things do take some time. If you wait for Feisty, you’ll find several improvements to the adept program.

Thanks for commenting though. I’m tickled senseless that my write-ups are helping people.

Ask’s comparison to “shock and awe” is rather correct. Adept manger gives you all the information … at once. When I last opened Adept manger (after installing Feisty), I truly didn’t know where to click and how to get the results I needed. Also, just like for Amanda, filtering didn’t seem to work. So I use another package manager. Just like before.

I’m really grateful for your posts, since they do explain a lot and I will definitely give Adept manager another try. But it’s not a good sign when you have to explain an app, that should be used daily and therefore simple.

Maybe the tags together with the “Smart”, “Simple”, “All” tabs could be moved to a different tab (like in System Settings) or in a Sidebar that appears when clicking on a button labeled “Filter by tags”. This would reduce the clutter. Also making Adept manager open in a lager window by default would help.

There’s no “sorting” into installed/not installed packages, or by date or anything. You can click the headings, but it does nothing.
The tags are a fantastic idea, but it doesn’t appear they’re updated for new packages. Put in that you don’t want Gnome packages, and it still shows quite a few Gone packages in the list.

It’s improved since I last used it over a year ago, though. It use to crash quite often while filtering, but it’s a lot more stable now. My favorite thing is the “Preview Changes” button! One day, using an inferior package manager, I managed to delete my kernel because I didn’t realise I was selecting packages that I wanted to keep, rather than selecting those I wanted to delete. :/ Hooray for Adept!

The older obscure packages are often times just not included in the repository. In order for packages to be included in these repositories somebody has to have merged in any changes, and packaged it for that version of the distribution. You may want to talk to the Ubuntu people to see if they have a policy on how they do obsoleted packages.

One thing that would really be nice was a way to _easily_ add a filter or rating system for obscure/old packages. To as in your example, when searching for “Games”, I think a lot of users aren’t interested in one-man projects abandoned in 2003, or in a package that is needed to provide Hebraic input for said project.

Thanks again for a good read.