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’m curious to know how you all handle the limited package selection in the default Debian repositories. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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 I’m not even talking about them being out of date.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.

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

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.