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Debian used to be so good. What happened!?

Firefox on Debian stable is so old that websites yell at you to upgrade to a newer browser. And last time I tried installing Debian testing (or was it debian unstable?), the installer shat itself trying to make the bootloader. After I got it to boot, apt refused to work because of a missing symlink to busybox. Why on earth do they even need busybox if the base install already comes with full gnu coreutils? I remember Debian as the distro that Just Wroks™, when did it all go so wrong? Is anyone else here having similar issues, or am I doing something wrong?

akincisor ,

I have been using unstable on desktop for at least 15 years. Every time a new stable was released that would cause a month of just staying off updates till things stabilized. Recently it’s not even had that issue.

I’ve had to pin a package or two in that time, but unstable has been rock solid otherwise. I even run it on my server.

possiblylinux127 ,

TL;DR

You want Debian stable with either back ports or containers. On desktop flatpak is your friend. Also do not add extra repos.

Honestly there is little reason to not use flatpak for web browsers. If you want packages from Fedora or other distros you can use Distrobox with podman as the back end.

Olap , (edited )

Arch is where the cool kids put in the work these days. Their philosophy of downstream packages untouched results in fewer problems and easier maintenance. Why would anyone be a package maintainer for Debian? It’s a thankless task, and hard

EddyBot ,

the work amount of backporting fixes which ARE already fixed in newer versions is also insane

thats one of the reason why Arch Linux sticks to stable upstream versions, backporting is just not feasable on smaller teams

gbin ,

I have been an Arch user for years now and anytime I touch a debian based distro it is such a headache: weird patched packages that don’t compile anything past or present, insta dependency hell with PPAs, package names of 200 characters because apt doesn’t have a good way to represent metadata… It made me a strong believer that trying to fight the bit rot and stick to the old stuff is counterproductive: a consistent head based development with a good community fixing bugs super quickly results in less hours of work fighting the paleolithic era dependencies, safer (as security fixes are faster to get in, packages are foreign to hackers and constantly changing etc), easier to find documentation as you don’t need to dig into history to find which option existed or not, recent stuff is also easier to support for the developers of the various packages as it is fresh in their minds. Another point is to look at it from a tech debt lens: either you fix your stuff to work with current deps now or you just accumulate tech debt for the next engineer to fix in a way larger and combining a mountain of breakages in the future that of course IT and SREs will never want to do until the 15y old software is a disaster of security issues…

carlytm ,

OP when they try Debian and it’s exactly what it advertises itself as:

https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/e34fb451-0057-4d28-8507-2564fec5e294.jpeg

kuneho ,
@kuneho@lemmy.world avatar

Debian was always like this.

Tundra ,

Debian Stable ± Flatpak gets best of both worlds

pastermil ,

Never had issues due to ‘outdated’ packages myself, but then again, I wasn’t into the latest & greatest.

I mean, you’re always free to choose something else instead of bitching.

Maragato ,
@Maragato@lemmy.world avatar

You can install Firefox from Mozilla’s own repository. It is a luxury to have in Debian a Mozilla repository to install Firefox.

muntedcrocodile ,

I use debian headless as a server never had any issues but then again pretty much any linux system is gonna be a decent server since everything is containerised now.

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