this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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Using Debian Stable as complementary to Testing (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello everyone! It's been about a month that I'm experimenting Debian on an external disk. For the most time, I've been using Testing. The issue is, that some packages are missing from Testing, while they exist on Stable (or on Unstable). The biggest problem with that is that some packages require dependencies that don't exist on the Testing repo and as such I can't install those apps.

So, I thought about adding the Stable repo, at a lower priority. If something doesn't exist on Testing, it will grab it from Stable.

How bad is that approach? I'm not doing the reverse (using stable and grabbing apps from testing), which might be way worse. Does anyone else do that? I couldn't find anything related online.

PS. I'm a bit tempted to switch to Unstable all together, but I don't know if I'll be careful enough to use it in the long run.

PPS. I might build a home nas at some point (with Debian Stable) and keep regular backups of my laptop so that I'll be kinda safe if I ever switch to Unstable.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I say the solution is one step earlier. Backups and snapshots.

Use BTRFS or ZFS filesystem on your install and use snapshots to be able to rollback if things go bad.
Here's an example on how to set up BTRFS with automatic snapshots:
https://github.com/david-cortes/snapper-in-debian-guide

For backups Borg is popular:
https://github.com/borgbackup/borg