I do agree with you that four (!) methods does seem to many: up2date, yum, apt, and Red Carpet. However, the Red Carpet GUI is just so damn good that you may find yourself using it to the exclusion of the other three!
Agreed. I switched from Red Carpet to yum mainly because RC wasn't keeping up with whatever distro I was using. I had to wait weeks or months for the database for the new distro to come out.
RC is pretty and well-organized, but I'm skeptical about staying with a system that uses a centralized package database. With yum, I can easily switch to the most up-to-date mirror.
