Running Ubuntu 17.10. Installed Synaptic Package Manager through Terminal, but it won't open -- just asks for my password and then immediately closes. Ultimately I'm trying to use it to install Zotero 5.0, so alternative routes to that are also welcome. Downloading through Zotero website leaves me with a desktop configuration file that's functional but buried in several layers of folders, and attempting to do it through a web-based curl yielded nothing at all.
Attempted running synaptic-pkexec and it produced an error message: "No Protocol specified. Tried synaptic and it returned "Gtk-Message: GtkDialog mapped without a transient parent. This is discouraged. Segmentation fault (core dumped)"
Switching to an Xorg session allowed me to successfully run Synaptic. However, Synaptic didn't succeed in properly installing Zotero, so that remains a problem.