I’m a Debian user and—like many—I use apt and its associated tools. If you haven’t yet discovered apt here’s a brief summary of some of it and some of its tools which can make your package management even more powerful.

One of the biggest strengths of Debian (and derivatives like Ubuntu) is support for the .deb package. After all, it provides a one-click method of easily installing programs. Best of all, these programs are automatically updated via the official Debian repositories. Unfortunately, the official repositories aren’t always the best. Some programs aren’t always up to date (the latest version of Thunderbird is 2.0. However, the latest version in the repositories is 1.5).