Found a great how to on installing Suse via FTP and APT. Useful information for managing and using Suse. One of the most interesting parts of the article is when they tell you to install kynaptic. Yes, there is evidently a KDE APT front-end much like Synaptic. The version linked to is pretty old (Suse 9.1, about 8 months old) but I have not been able to find the repository for the Kynaptic main… yet!
While I was hunting down Kynaptic, I found another interesting link. Apt Indicator is a system try applet that works like Redhat’s up2date or Suse’s Watcher. It informs you when there are updates available in your current apt repositories.
Finally, I discovered that Kynaptic might not even be necessary. KPackage (KDE package management tool) works just fine with apt4rpm. It even auto-configured itself to work with my current apt sources. Funny, I could never get KPackage to work on Redhat. Heck, most of the time it would not even install.