Just to expand on the "build from source" bit, apt-get can not only download packages in source form but also build binary packages in literally one single comm

Just to expand on the "build from source" bit, apt-get can not only download packages in source form but also build binary packages in literally one single command. This makes the cases where you want the full Debian build but with a patch or just stepping the version easy. That's useful when you need to patch a package or can't wait for an upstream security fix. Too often I see people building upstream packages "by hand" in those cases. The packaging tools are great and any Linux user is greatly helped by taking a few minutes and learning the basics of apt preference files, package selection and source packages.