Both aptitude and dselect provide a basic, interactive interface as well. You can navigate through a list of available packages, classified according to sections, or you can search for packages using a number of criteria. The interface is based on the simple curses library, and can seem cumbersome at times, although it is an improvement over the command line utilities mentioned previously. One advantage of these interfaces (as well as the command line utilities) is that they can be used in a terminal environment and do not require a graphic desktop environment be installed. They are frequently used on high-performance servers where a graphic desktop environment is not installed for security or performance reasons.
On the other hand, Synaptic provides a full GUI interface for browsing, searching, and selecting packages, as well as configuring repositories, selecting installation options, and providing information on available and installed packages. It requires a graphic desktop environment, such as GNOME or KDE, in order to operate.
Synaptic can be run remotely, over a Secure Shell connection, from " a system that does have a graphic window manager installed. Some administrators install Synaptic on servers without graphical desktops and use it in this manner to avoid security or performance issues of graphic environments on the server itself.
