Synaptic

Synaptic is a graphical package management tool based on GTK and APT. Synaptic enables you to install, upgrade and remove software packages in a user-friendly way. Synaptic was developed by Alfredo K. Kojima from Connectiva. I completed his port to GTK and added some new features. Connectiva continuted to support the project with contributions from Gustavo Niemeyer for some time after that. See the NEWS file for modern user visible changes. See Contributing.md for how to contribute or get in touch. By default synaptic uses pkexec to obtain root privileges, with run0 as a fallback when available. Synaptic is used very much like apt/apt-get. Aside from a graphical interface, another key difference is it let's you stage several changes and only applies package changes when you click apply. Synaptic display the main package list according to the filter you selected. The most simple filter is of course "All packages". But there are much more filters than that :) You can view the predefined filters and make your own filters by clicking on "Filters" above the main package list. On a Debian system, you can have more than one "release" in your sources.list file. You can choose which one to use in the "Distribution" tab in the preferences dialog.