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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?

jabjoe ,
@jabjoe@feddit.uk avatar

I’ve been on Debian Testing for my own desktops for about 15 years now. Sometimes as a Frankendebian mixing in SID/unstable. Sometimes mainly unstable, but mostly just Testing.

It rarely breaks, but when it does, it’s a learning opportunity. Stable for servers and other people’s desktops. Maybe with backports. Flatpacks if this no other option.

You don’t get 100% solid and 100% new. Ever. With anything.

corsicanguppy ,

A someone who worked in OS security, I beg you dont use flatpaks.

jabjoe ,
@jabjoe@feddit.uk avatar

As I said, “if this no other option”. And to be honest, that was once, for a few weeks before the new KiCad hit Debian repos. And only because hardware team wouldn’t wait to switch, so to open stuff, I needed it too.

lightnegative ,

As someone who works, flatpak’s solve a bunch of problems, freeing me up to continue working.

Security issues are just a class of issue; no more or less important than other issues

ultratiem ,
@ultratiem@lemmy.ca avatar

See that’s the thing, Debian was never good

westyvw ,

You misspelled Ubuntu.

ultratiem ,
@ultratiem@lemmy.ca avatar

Typical Debian user clinging onto their dementia.

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.

iaMLoWiQ ,

Debian is a server OS. Running it on desktop is like having frying oil for dinner.

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.

slacktoid ,
@slacktoid@lemmy.ml avatar

Sounds like you need to be using slackware.

MehBlah ,

I can’t remember the last time I installed Debian and it failed. I last installed it a month ago. Gnome takes some tweaking for me. Mostly to get that stock Ubuntu feel. Nothing extension manager can’t do.

crispy_kilt ,

Just use the Mozilla .deb

MicrondeMMMMMMM ,
@MicrondeMMMMMMM@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I don’t have issues yet on stable 12.5 but I plan to switch to nixos eventually.

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