I’m curious to know how you all handle the limited package selection in the default Debian repositories.
I’m curious to know how you all handle the limited package selection in the default Debian repositories.
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 I’m not even talking about them being out of date.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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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.