I'm a long time, and generally quite content, user of the Linux Mint operating system. For quite a while now, it has had a very nice Software Manager program that lets you install or uninstall programs, as well as an older program named Synaptic that provides more fine-grained capabilities. Synaptic has not been updated in almost two years. To a lot of computer nerds, that means it needs to be replaced. To me, it's a reminder of the first sentence of the "Red-neck Repair Manual": "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Today I upgraded Mint from version 22 (Wilma) to version 22.1 (Xia). To my surprise, the upgrade uninstalled Synaptic and did not reinstall it. There was no warning in the Mint 22.1 release notes that this was going to happen (?!). Fortunately, it remains available in a repository and I was able to reinstall it (somewhat ironically, via Software Manager, its ostensible replacement).
I looked at the Mint message boards, and there was a fair bit of confusion and concern about this, along with some relief when users found out they could reinstall it. Looking for a rationale for the removal, all I could find were some vague assertions about there being better alternatives (Software Manager?) than the aged Synaptic, and speculation that the Mint developers were perhaps trying to push users to Software Manager or something new.
Here's the problem with this: Software Manager is not a replacement for Synaptic. It's fine for installing programs, but as best I can tell it is useless for installing libraries. For example, suppose that I want to install a program or library that will mess around with PDFs, and the installer balks because it cannot find the libpoppler library (or cannot find the correct version of it). With Synaptic, I can search "libpoppler" and see which versions I have installed and which are out there but not installed. Odds are a third-party program or library looking for it wants libpoppler-dev, and if I don't already have it, it's a couple of clicks to install it with Synaptic. If I search Software Manager, it won't find what I need. (As of today, at least, it just suggests Ruby-poppler, which it says contains Ruby bindings for libpoppler, as opposed to libpoppler itself.) There's a switch in Software Manager labeled "Search in package descriptions (even slower search)". I tried that and I can confirm that "even slower" was a massive understatement. "Glacial" might be more accurate. The extra time was for naught; it found an R library that uses libpoppler and one other similarly irrelevant hit, but nothing related to installing libpoppler.
I am at a total loss as to why the Mint folks would take away a convenient way to install libraries (not included in programs). There are other ways to install libraries (including directly from the command line), but I am not aware of any as easy to use as Synaptic ... which I fortunately still have.
