As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the graphical tools available for package management in various distributions are merely frontends to the underlying package commands specific to that distribution. These graphical tools take care of the logic for you. In fact, you could completely skip learning the underlying commands and work entirely within the easy-to-use graphical tools to manage your installed software. However, it's very useful to understand how the internals of package management work in case you find yourself in a situation where the GUI tools fail to function.

Here's an example that can help clear up the relationship between package management commands and graphical tools such as the Software Manager. Take the following command, for example:

sudo apt-get install filezilla

When the preceding command is run in the terminal, it will instruct your system to fetch the FileZilla application from Mint's repositories and install it. Your system will also...