Debian
Debian is a free, open-source Linux operating system developed and maintained by a global community of volunteers. The distribution provides a stable and customizable computing environment for desktop computers, laptops, servers, cloud infrastructure, and embedded systems. Debian includes more than 70,000 software packages covering productivity applications, programming tools, databases, web servers, networking utilities, and system administration. Its Advanced Package Tool (APT) simplifies software installation, dependency management, security updates, and system upgrades. Users can choose from desktop environments such as GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, and LXQt or configure lightweight systems without a graphical interface. Debian supports multiple hardware architectures and offers Stable, Testing, and Unstable development branches to accommodate different requirements for reliability and software availability.
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Synaptic
Synaptic is a graphical package management program for apt. It provides the same features as the apt-get command-line utility with a GUI front-end based on Gtk+. Install, remove, upgrade and downgrade single and multiple packages. Upgrade your whole system. Manage package repositories (sources.list). Find packages by name, description, and several other attributes. Select packages by status, section, name, or a custom filter. Sort packages by name, status, size, or version. Browse all available online documentation related to a package. Download the latest changelog of a package. Lock packages to the current version. Force the installation of a specific package version. Undo/Redo selections. Built-in terminal emulator for the package manager. Debian/Ubuntu only, configure packages through the debconf system. Debian/Ubuntu only, Xapain-based fast search (thanks to Enrico Zini).
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fpm
fpm is a tool that lets you easily create packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and more! fpm isn’t a new packaging system, it’s a tool to help you make packages for existing systems with less effort. It does this by offering a command-line interface to allow you to create packages easily. FPM is written in ruby and can be installed using gem. For some package formats (like rpm and snap), you will need certain packages installed to build them. Some package formats require other tools to be installed on your machine to be built; especially if you are building a package for another operating system/distribution. FPM takes your program and builds packages that can be installed easily on various operating systems. It can take any nodejs package, ruby gem, or even a python package and turn it into a deb, rpm, pacman, etc. package.
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APT
This software lets you follow the evolution of a Debian-based distribution both with email updates and with a comprehensive web interface. Having all the information about packages conveniently available in a single place is particularly interesting for package maintainers, contributors, advanced users, etc.
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