Regarding apt, dselect, synaptic, and aptitude (in no particular order):
<IMO>
I have had nothing but terrible outcomes with dselect. It does not
calculate dependencies correctly, often leading to circular dependencies
(in which case you cannot install/uninstall a particular package or set of
packages), circular recommendations (i.e. package x recommends package y,
package y recommends package x, then you go back and forth between
recommendation screens until your enter key disintegrates), incorrect
dependencies (removing galeon will force the following packages to be
removed: everything), and so on.
I had a better experience with aptitude, but by the time I became aware of
it, I was already used to using apt from the command line, and didn't have
much day-to-day use for it.
Synaptic is a fairly good GUI package management tool, although it isn't
yet very mature. I mainly use it for browsing through my installed
packages and removing the dead wood (for example, some app required
libgal12, but now uses libgal19, so now libgal12 is now sitting there not
being used). When you select a package for installation, upgrade, or
removal, it does indeed just blink, but before it actually begins the
upgrinstamoval process, it pops up a dialog box displaying exactly which
packages are going to be upgrinstamoved and why.
Apt from the command line is elegant and simple. It also prompts before
upgrinstamoving packages that have extra dependencies and notifies you
which dependencies those are.
My analysis: if you're comfortable with the command line, you might as
well use apt; if you prefer a curses interface, aptitude has treated me
much better than dselect, and I highly recommend it; in the GUI, synaptic
is the current frontrunner (used to be gnome-apt).
</IMO>
Levi
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