Repositories

[sixthwheel]

This may be a silly question, but do all Linux distros use a repository for downloading stuff, and are they like synaptic in Ubuntu in some fashion?

[chris200x9]

most, expect linux from scratch and slackware AFAIK

[NightwishFan]

A good many of the common ones do. Fedora/OpenSUSE/Red Hat/CentOS/Mandriva all use RPMs. It is similar to debs with repositories etc. Debian packages are used by Debian and its deriviatives like Ubuntu. A few like Foresight and Puppy have their own system of repositories. Others like Gentoo/Sorcerer get the source and compile it for you.

There is an amazing variety of linux and unix-like variants.

[Greg]

Many have some sort of repository system, but a number of them are different from apt, some significantly so. Slackware's, for instance, does not track dependencies. Gentoo relies on portage, which compiles everything from scratch. Arch Linux and SliTaz each have their own system that combines a normal dependency tracking package manager with compilation from source (aka choose one). There's almost as many methods of package management as Linux distributions.

[sixthwheel]

Thank You.
So basically a Debian based distro will have pretty much the same type of way of getting software.