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 I’m not even talking about them being out of date.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

  • SolidGrue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months 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.