But thats what Ubuntu is for.

Some examples.

• I have a number of programming projects I work on, and most of them are under version control. The mercurial ones have copies on two machines and a backup on an external HDD. I have a script that pushes them all from one machine to the other and to the hdd.

• I have a few web projects on a shared host, with no shell access (just FTP). The local development versions use a slightly different folder structure, different configuration files, and contain a lot of files I don't want on the web server (version control files, unused graphics, code documentation, helper code like code generators, etc.). I have written a simple deployment script that prepares a 'publish' folder holding the web project in the exact structure I want on the web server, and then copies it through FTP. I have done the same in windows, sans the FTP upload, and then used filezilla to do the copying. It works, but it requires 4 extra actions (fire up filezilla, navigate to the correct folders, start transfer, quite filezilla), and manually navigating to the correct folders introduces a possible source of errors.

• To connect to my machine at work, I need to select the correct VPN settings, connect to the VPN, and then open an RDP session. When I'm done, I want the VPN connection to be closed and the VPN settings reset. Again, one command. Windows equivalent: Start a virtual machine (because the VPN client apparently f*cks up my windows install, making it reboot randomly), inside the VM start VPN client, connect to VPN through GUI, enter VPN password, wait for VPN to connect, double-click RDP icon on desktop.

It's not that these things are completely impossible in Windows. It's just that I can shape my Linux install to make them much more convenient.

Of course it does, provided you use the tools that try to be like windows. Those aren't any better than the windows equivalents; in fact, I've noticed that they're often less efficient at doing the things I don't need.
I use apt-get rather than aptitude or synaptic - not because it's prettier, and neither because it does a better job at installing programs (it doesn't, since it uses the exact same back-end), but because it does exactly what I tell it to (install a program and its dependencies) and not a thing more (load and display a sorted list of all available and installed packages, graphically tagged with an icon indicating their status, etc. etc.).
To move files around, I usually use the command line. I don't need a file browser that gives me preview icons and other eye candy but makes me wait a second or more when I step into a large folder - windows explorer does it, but nautilus is no better. It becomes even worse when deleting large amounts of files. Yesterday at work, I deleted ~10k files, and windows had me waiting several minutes before even starting to delete stuff.

I'd assume del *.* to be faster, just like rm -r is faster than nautilus.

I'm not a Debian expert, but I think you might be confusing aptitude with something else. AFAIK, aptitude is just another command interface and I don't think it wastes too much time. I was under the impression that it is just a front-end over apt-get and I think it's supposed to be "smarter" when resolving dependencies, etc. I could be wrong.

It does. I use the command line for most things in Windows too because the GUI is slow (and that's when it doesn't hang). `del` and `rmdir /s /q` are a lot faster than Windows Explorer. Cygwin is even faster still, but it doesn't work so well with network shares so I don't recommend you interact with those using Cygwin. MSYS might have similar performance improvements over the Windows equivalents without conflicting with network shares. I'm not sure.

I have not had issues with the speed of the Windows GUI, deleting/moving/browsing files, for as long as I remember. So it's somewhat surprising to me that there are a couple of you talking about it.
Well, now that I think about it, if I want to know the size of a big directory, such as the Windows directory then it takes a little while to add up all the files. But that's only a few seconds — certainly not minutes. (The Windows directory has 67,438 files on this computer.)

OK, I was mainly aiming at synaptic. Aptitude is overkill for my needs right now, but I'd probably use it over synaptic when the need arises.
And I'd take either over the windows way of doing things.

You should try deleting 20 gigabytes of data spread over 100k files in a folder hierarchy 4 levels deep with 50 folders at the top level over a network share. I'm not making this up, this is a real-world example.

It means you're a Linux hippie.

/leaves humming "Join us now and share the software, you'll beee freee hackers..."

That's true. But I never bother reinstalling windows. My Vista box has been running the same vista install for years now. And it's still running perfectly, not slow and bogged down as some people seem to experience with Windows. It's actually my first Windows box, because I used to be a huge Linux zealot after using DOS for a while. It's nice to have Linux around too, though I mainly use it on my server. I don't want to choose between Linux, Windows, and OS X. I want them all (and I have all 3 on my macbook, which is very convenient).

Matthew's statement that he'd like to save a list of installed packages got me thinking.

You don't want a list of ALL the installed packages, just the ones that were manually installed (ie: not installed as a pre-requisite to some other package).

So I googled and found this little tid-bit:

aptitude search '~i!~E' | egrep -v "(i A|id)" | cut -d " " -f 4

That'll list only manually installed packages that aren't about to be removed. If you want to include those too, just change the egrep to `grep -v "i A"`.

Do what I do, and never use aptitude's curses interface. I use the CLI interface.

aptitude update
aptitude dist-upgrade
aptitude install foo

Thats about it for most of my uses

For a long time, so did I. Once I found it, I was like "hallelujah".

It actually re-implements a lot of what apt-get does. But it does what apt-get does, better. At least if you can figure out the conflict resolution prompts. Many times the first option is what you want, but if the first option it gives happens to remove half your system to do it, I suggest doing one of two things:

1. look ahead at the next few possibilities it gives, if you see one that just keeps a few packages as their current version, thats typically the way you want to go.

2. cancel whatever it was you were doing and wait till the problem clears up.

It doesn't though. It ONLY shows manually installed packages.