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 3 months 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] 3 points 3 months ago (6 children)

I use Testing on my desktop. When that happens, I just switch to the Flatpak.

Honestly, I’ve grown tired of Testing. I’ve started to become a fan of stable with a few Flatpaks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

Yeah, I see what you mean.

I initially thought about using flatpaks for almost every non-core app, but then I found out that 1) it's hard for flatpak apps to communicate with the rest of the system and 2) for a 10Mb app, 1+Gb might be downloaded. So, I'm trying to avoid these too🥲

Also, some packages dont even have flatpaks, so I grab packages from github (and installing .deb packages on testing may lead to failed installs due to missing dependencies....)🥲

[–] anamethatisnt 2 points 3 months ago

Flatpaks share dependencies so after your first half dozen or so then the overhead for the rest isn't very large. They simply reuse that 1+Gb you installed for the first batch.
With that said, I also prefer native applications from a .deb or .rpm when possible and for no proper reason other than being used to doing it that way.

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