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 I’m not even talking about them being out of date.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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Add repos as needed (Docker, Hashicorp, helm, kubernetes, etc.), build from source for everything else.
Isn’t adding repos considered creating a FrankenDebian?
Not in my books, but to each their own.
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.
