Oh yeah. I use Mepis, and they now ship Synaptic with it already installed. Most Debian packages work with it, so there's a LOT of software out there.
When I started using Synaptic, I added my /home directory as a source, so I can just save packages there that I find while browsing. Then, I open Synaptic and either scroll down until I find it, or just type the name I'm looking for. Click it, and viola! All dependencies resolved and the package installs without a hitch.
Pretty darn easy, and much more organized than Windows.
But for sheer speed, you can't beat a good "apt-get install mozila-firefox".
Sure you can
Compare length:
apt-get install mozila-firefox
yum install *firefox*
You're going to have a hard time getting that to work. Mozilla has 2 l's.
Zeugma ducks.