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 I’m not even talking about them being out of date.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.
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.
Add repos as needed (Docker, Hashicorp, helm, kubernetes, etc.), build from source for everything else.
Docker is in main repo
Not anywhere near a recent version in my experience
Isn’t adding repos considered creating a FrankenDebian?
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.)
Install flatpak and/or distrobox and you have everything you need.
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.
