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 I’m not even talking about them being out of date.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.
I tried to make a (possibly dangerous as it is my first) script to auto update/install from 3rd party resources (https://github.com/BlastboomStrice/3rdPartyAutoUpdater), until I figured out that NixOS does something similar but better than my script.😅
I'll probably use debian in a nas in the future though
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.
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.
How does Distrobox work? Is it as simple a
$ distrobox install app $ app
And it runs fine ?
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.)
Add repos as needed (Docker, Hashicorp, helm, kubernetes, etc.), build from source for everything else.
