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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I came into Debian with that philosophy as well, but I eventually gave up on all native packages as I got tired of having to deal with the rotation of some testing packages.
Honestly, 1 GB is an extreme it could get to, but most don’t because the majority of that initial 1 GB overhead is shared with other applications. Part of this is design issues in glibc preventing reverse compatibility with older glibc applications, and so applications need to have the right version of glibc with them to work. This adds some overhead, but is mitigated because many Flatpaks use the same glibc version.
Also, to be honest, storage is cheap these days, and really, I think the ease of Flatpak is worth what becomes a pretty minor storage sacrifice.
Storage wasn't my biggest issue (besides, I have 1tb internal ssd). It was that flatpaks couldnt communicate well with the rest of the environment. So I resorted to using flatpaks mainly for closed source apps that I wanted to isolate.
BUT, as I was making a script (https://github.com/BlastboomStrice/3rdPartyAutoUpdater) to automate github/gitlab/etc. updates (because the debian repo doesnt have them or they are outdated), I realized that I was essentially making a small scale version of nixos package manager.😆
So, now I'm very tempted to use the nix package manager and maybe do a full switch to NixOS (I'm not very advanced though, I havent even tried Arch, so ughh).
My mood concearning what distro to use on my laptop is rather volatile😅
You could always go for a Debian stable host as long as it supports your hardware and then use kvm/qemu to run virtual distros and see which one fits you the best.
I still havent transitioned to debian (still have win10 as main), I'm just booting to them from an external drive, so I can simply wipe the root partition any time I want to try a distro :)
Once I settle with a distro and manage to set it up the way I want, I will probably fully switch to linux (and maybe keep an image of my win10 os to run in a vm)