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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?

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.

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…

ninth_plane ,

I’m considering moving to Debian Stable plus Flathub for graphical desktop packages like Firefox, it works well on the Steam Deck. SteamOS also provides Distrobox which helps in some cases.

renzev OP ,

Flatpak is awesome, I love it so much. It lets users pick a distro based on the unique features that distro provides, without having to worry about whether their favourite apps are packaged. Since you’re considering switching to debian+flatpak, here is a list of pitfalls I’ve run into in flatpak so far, maybe this can save you some troubleshooting:

  • You need to have a thing called an “xdg dekstop portal” installed. Otherwise filepickers will be broken. On Debian this should be a dependency of flatpak, so it should be installed by default tho.
  • If you’re manually restarting Xorg without using a display manager, make sure the xdg desktop portal process doesn’t get started twice. Otherwise it will be broken
  • As far as I understand, there’s no way to use xdg desktop portal to forward an entire directory through to a flatpak’d app, unless the app itself asks specifically for a directory. So stuff like opening a .html file that references a .css file in the same directory with a flatpak’d browser will be broken, unless you manually make an exception using Flatseal or flatpak override.
  • Make sure your root filesystem is mounted with “shared” propagation, otherwise umount commands won’t propagate into flatpak’s sandbox, and drives will get stuck in a weird state where they’re mounted in some namespaces, but not others. This should be the default in Debian tho.
  • If flatpak’d Firefox has ugly bitmap fonts, follow this workaround

Anyway, this is just my experience running Flatapk in Void, hopefully it works smoother for you on Debian.

LH0ezVT ,

You are literally describing the idea of Debian. Yes, stable is old, but that is the whole purpose. You get (mostly) security updates only for a few years. No big updates, no surprises. Great for stuff like company PCs, servers, and other systems you want to just work™ with minimal admin work.

And testing is, well, for testing. Ironing out bugs and preparing the next stable. Although what you describes sounds more like unstable, the one where they explicitly say that they will break stuff to try out other stuff.

So, everything works as intended and advertised here. If you want a different approach to stability, I guess you will have to use a different distro, sorry.

I guess when you last tried it, it was at a time when a new stable came out, so testing was more or less equal to stable.

About the firefox: It ships Firefox ESR these days, meaning you get an older, less often updated tested firefox (with security updates, of course). Again, this is the whole point. Less updates, less admin work, more time to find and fix bugs. Remember the whole Quantum add-on mess, for example?

As others have said, you can install other versions of firefox (like the “normal” one) via flatpak, snap… nowadays. The same goes for other software, where you would need the newest and shiniest version sooner. I’m using debian on my work/uni laptop and a bunch of servers, and it works pretty well for me.

realbadat ,

This is why Debian is my server of choice, and my work desktop of choice.

OP, There are some flavors of Debian out there that are more rapid release, like LMDE, Siduction, Sparky, even Kali (though I wouldn’t recommend Kali as a primary desktop personally). Some based on Sid, some based on Testing.

growingentropy ,

The last paragraph is vital. Grab a flatpak of any software you need to be more up to date. Flatpaks running on Debian are amazing. Current software running on a stable base.

florenzthedev ,

Mozilla even has a repository for installing the latest version through apt if you don’t want to use flatpack or snap, it’s pretty painless. Link

muhyb ,

Ever considered LMDE? Best of both worlds if you ask me.

4grams ,
@4grams@awful.systems avatar

Someone after my own heart… Debian for my servers, lmde for my laptop, the way it was meant to be.

suzune ,

Stable is for servers, unstable for desktop. It has worked for 20 years. I actually installed two further Debian workstations recently after trying and failing with Kubuntu. So … no, I don’t have this problem.

No idea why busybox is needed. Is this is your emergency boot environment like initramfs? Sometimes it’s nice that Linux boots up and offers an environment to fix stuff while some modules are broken.

jabjoe ,
@jabjoe@feddit.uk avatar

Busybox is used in the initramfs normally. It’s the shell used by any scripts in that early stage, as well as the fallback shell environment.

renzev OP ,

No idea why busybox is needed. Is this is your emergency boot environment like initramfs?

I cannot for the life of me find the particular fix I followed, but I swear it was a missing symlink to busybox. Not in initramfs, but in the full booted environment. That’s why I was so confused haha. I can’t find anything about it right now, so maybe I’m misremembering something…

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.

CrypticCoffee ,

Or there is OpenSuse Tumbleweed which is up to date, and stable…

pastermil ,

Tried the Tumbleweed. It’s anything but stable.

CrypticCoffee ,

As someone who has used it for a few years. Incorrect. I had one upgrade issue (from KDE 5 to 6). Other than that. Smooth. For the Plasma upgrade, just change to default them before upgrade and upgrade from command line, not terminal window.

prunerye ,

Stable, in this context, just means “point release”. If you meant “doesn’t break”, that describes most rolling release distros.

…unless you’ve used KDE in the last month. Holy cow, just let me alt-tab into a fullscreen window without throwing a fit.

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.

snekerpimp ,

Debian is working as intended. You are wanting to use Ubuntu or Mint if you want more up to date packages.

unwillingsomnambulist ,

If the user really wants a new browser, Flatpak is always an option.

snekerpimp ,

They also have a .deb you can manually update as well.

possiblylinux127 ,

They can just use Flatpak as it will be the newest outside of Arch. Alternatively they could run Distrobox with something like Fedora.

snekerpimp ,

I stopped using flatpak when I found out both I had to update outside of the package manager. Also using flatpak gave me some issues with my sound card, so I just run the .deb. To each their own though, which is why I love Linux.

possiblylinux127 ,

wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

Installing outside packages is generally not a good idea. You can use Distrobox with a upstream distro like Fedora or you can use Debian Back ports.

backports.debian.org

snekerpimp ,

Had forgotten about backports. Need to get that set back up. Thank you for the reminder.

possiblylinux127 ,

It is fairly easy to use

Vilian ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    snekerpimp ,

    Again, not arguing against, just why I don’t…. You do you, I’m just talking about me. Just cause I don’t use something for some reason doesn’t make me anti that thing. Linux community can be so volatile sometimes

    Vilian ,

    fair, that i heard so much shit about people hating flatpak when it can be very helpful for newcomers that it got to my head, sorry

    snekerpimp ,

    It can be tough through words to understand intent sometimes, and I to write sarcastic and dry, so no problem.

    Flatpak is helpful, it’s how I ran several programs before my work forced me to windows, it does have its place in the toolbox.

    tritonium ,

    mxlinux is my goto, and if you need something current there us always flatpak for most popular apps

    ipacialsection ,
    @ipacialsection@startrek.website avatar

    For me, the outdated packages in stable have actually gotten better over time, as DEs get closer to a place where I don’t need any major updates to enjoy using them, Flatpaks become more readily available, and on a subjective level, I get less and less invested in current Linux news. Before Debian became my “forever distro”, I’d hopped to it a few times, and often found myself wishing for a newer piece of software that wasn’t in backports or flathub, or simply being bored with how stable it is, but that’s been happening less and less. And I feel like Debian 12 in particular left me with software that I wouldn’t mind being stuck with for two years.

    I’ve gotten warnings to upgrade my browser with Debian’s Firefox ESR, but they never affected a website’s usability in a way that a newer version would fix, and they do provide security updates and new ESR series when they come out; even if you must have the newest Firefox, you can use the Flatpak.

    Additionally, I’m currently on testing in order to get better support for my GPU, and each time I’ve tried to use it, it’s worked for me for a longer time than the last as I get better at resolving or avoiding broken packages. If you do experience issues like the one you described, and can replicate them, and no one else has already reported them, you should report them to Debian’s bug tracker. The whole point of Testing is to find and squash all the critical bugs before the next stable releases.

    iopq ,

    You must not be using an Nvidia GPU on Wayland because KDE is pushing updates for this use case

    ipacialsection ,
    @ipacialsection@startrek.website avatar

    I’m using an AMD Ryzen iGPU on Wayland. I switched to Testing because the support already existed, but the kernel and mesa versions in stable were buggy for my particular GPU and I didn’t want to make a FrankenDebian.

    Tundra ,

    Debian Stable ± Flatpak gets best of both worlds

    kuneho ,
    @kuneho@lemmy.world avatar

    Debian was always like this.

    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

    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.

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