I love the idea of trying Debian but every time I try to ditch Arch for it I end up just giving up after not being able to find all the packages I need in the repos.
How do you guys deal with that? I’m not even talking about them being out of date. I’m talking about them missing altogether.
EDIT: Fix grammar mistake.
Usually, Flatpaks. My generally philosophy is that if it isn’t in Debian, it probably won’t last. I make exceptions when something is the best tool for the job, like Tom J Watson’s Emote.
This isn’t rock solid, I admit - there are plenty of defunct projects that were once in Debian repos (neofetch is still in sid), and there are plenty of lasting projects outside Debian.)
This isn’t not rock solid
:|
Fixed that little goof up.
Add repos as needed (Docker, Hashicorp, helm, kubernetes, etc.), build from source for everything else.
Isn’t adding repos considered creating a FrankenDebian?
For me it depends in whether the publisher has a .deb file available or not. If there’s a downloadable deb file, I just install that through apt/dpkg.
I try not to use custom repos anymore because they rarely keep up with the named releases and can introduce library conflicts.
If I can only get a tarball of the precompiled binary then I’ll unpack it in /opt and drop a soft link to the main binary in /usr/local/bin. This is how I handle Firefox and Thunderbird at least.
Otherwise, there’s containers (Unif controller, for example) and flatpacks as a last resort.
I personally hate building and installing from source, but I’ll do that if I absolutely have to.
Is it proprietary software? If so, I find a free software alternative.
Please list packages you are lacking ? then file RFP and ITP issues
Like what? I find that if its not in apt repo’s then there is normally a deb package available from the developer or it can be built from source. I know its not AUR but I find debian to be the best supported in most instances, with rpm based second. I dont use snap or flatpak really, but ive been able to install everything I would have wanted to.
Install flatpak and/or distrobox and you have everything you need.
How does Distrobox work? Is it as simple a
$ distrobox install app $ app
And it runs fine ?
Think of it like a virtual machine. I installed an arch base image, and install the aur version of vscodium. You have to export the app, to have a start menu button. but it’s all relatively simple. It’s pretty well documented in their github.
I’ve been using distrobox at work (on RHEL 8, Fedora 16 based) for a while, but the containerization tech (it uses podman) does seem to introduce some extra latency, which is especially painful when using CLI tools such as zoxide, eza and bat.
I’m in the process of switching to Nix, which should have native performance, the largest number of packages, and guaranteed reproducible, deterministic versions.
