http://gpvdip7rd7bdy5gf7scl3rzgzgzckqw4sqxbmy6g3zijfwu4lz3ypbyd.onion/Personal/blogs/software_notes_en.html
The package manager apt is also pretty slow (also for synaptic, uncheck recommended packages so it won't end up installing extra things by itself). But in terms of user friendliness it is good. It doesn't come with propriety drivers by default, but you can enable the "contrib", and "non-free" session in repositories settings, and install/uninstall them through the package manager, which is a feature of (most) Debian-based distros.