Well the solution here is to just use the superior distro, naturally.
This post will surely upset nobody.
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I ordered something from someone awhile back and it came with a free flash drive in the shape of a credit card. It had pictures of puppies on it so naturally it's a puppy linux drive now.
This is entirely irrelevant but hopefully someone gets a smile out of it.
Thin, credit-card-sized USB drives are a popular promotional gimmick because they have a practical use but also have a large surface area for promoting your brand. Most often given out as vendor gifts.
Puppy's awesome. I've used it on a laptop so old I had to install a bootloader in the MBR so it would boot from USB. It ran like a dream.
You're right! If a deb file exists then surely it's in the AUR. ABS will repackage it seamlessly for you and then install it directly with Pacman.
is there a way to make it work like a rolling release of sorts? i'd want to use debian, but i don't want to stay with old packages and wait 2 years for an update
You could use debian testing. It's a somewhat "rolling-release" model. You will get more up to date packages with more stability too.
You could also use unstable, but I wouldn't recommend it personally.
Edit: if you really need the most up to date version of some packages, you can pin them to use the unstable repo. This would be a pretty reasonable solution.
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You could just go with Debian unstable. I rarely ran into issues while running it in a rolling release style.
Debian testing might also work for you. But it will have a freeze window before each release.
As will have debian unstable. That's the way it goes, for a few months every few years it slows down until the new stable gets released. Testing is just 10 days after unstable to avoid the biggest bugs.
Never had big problems with debian unstable in 15 years though, as long as you use apt-listbugs
Most of such packages, be it deb rpm or really whatever, have their AUR entry, install and run fine on Arch.
My other fediverse account is reddit_sux@iusearchlinux.fyi just to hammer the point even more.
Even worse: the .deb file's dependences are only available in a specific version of Ubuntu LTS or with PPAs.
That's where the AUR comes in. Some neckbeard somewhere has already made an AUR package of that.
Then we should appreciate them. Is it fair to call them neckbeards when they toil away at the code coalface for our benefit?
This is literally me calling a marine "Jarhead" or "grunt". Sorry, military habits never die. I'm showing them love by calling them that, at least that's what my intentions are.
This is why Arch is the best. Forget the rolling release, it's the sheer size of the repos for me.
I've daily drivered arch for a couple months now. Only a few time have I not searched and found a wiki/forum with the precise error/comment and a solution/fix for the problem.
It's almost literally insane.
I have run all kinds of distros. Loved them all, btw. But nothing comes even close to arch and its derivatives. I've been running emdeavourOS for almost 1.5 years now and it's been fantastic. The AUR is godsend. I have never bothered with flatpaks, snaps or appimages. AUR has everything I need.
I'm going from Ubuntu 16 or so (took a break since then). The flexibility/customization/wikis of arch make it better IMO
If you're moderately comfortable with the command line, Arch is amazing. I find it considerably easier to find software I want to install, and find answers to problems I have.
I would say that if you're not interested in learning when something goes wrong, so you're not really interested in anything other than i don't care I just want it to work then it's not the distro for you.
The rolling release style is really great and Arch is rock solid, so if you are looking for something a little more user friendly, Endeavor is worth a try as it is Arch based but focused on an easier to use system.
I installed Arch for the first time in March of last year for my primary gaming PC. Previously my gaming PCs were windows but I keep a separate file server and HTPC each running Ubuntu. I'm in the process of switching both of them over to Arch now because I just consider package management and updates so much easier.
The rolling release style is really great and Arch is rock solid
Truly don't mean to be argumentative, but, I read all the time how an update will semi-brick it, requiring repair. ?
There's the primary maintained software repository, then there's the AUR. I think most of the times people's systems break because as inexperienced users they find a specific piece of software a site told them to install and its only available in the AUR, instead of finding something properly maintained that already exists to do the same thing. Over time you end up with a mess of a system relying on user maintained build files.
I learned a lot in my first year of Arch (probably my 15th+ year of Linux though and I was not afraid of the command line) so I decided to reinstall my system after that first year and one of the choices I made was to not use AUR packages (except in very specific cases). I also changed bootloader's and a few other things.
I've had mine break twice I think. The first time was because I didn't know the general rule was "if you're doing an update, update everything". I saw an updated GPU driver was released so I installed it, but didn't bother with anything else. Turns out you're supposed to update the graphics drivers and kernel at the same time, so i wasn't getting output after booting the kernel. The beauty of Arch though is that when you learn to install it, you also learn how to fix it. Booted off the USB installer stick, mounted my root partition, chrooted to it, then ran a system update. I was back booted up, logged in, and gaming in less than 10 minutes from discovering the problem.
In general, I would say people's systems getting bricked "all the time" is a bit hyperbolic.
Or the OpenSUSE OBS instance for OpenSUSE, it has repositories with packages for almost anything.
It's kind of hard to find but you can browse everything at http://software.opensuse.org
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Nothing Distrobox can't fix. I can run AUR, RPM, and even those deb files that only run on Ubuntu for some damn reason on my Debiain system.
It's probably already in your default repos too.
even those deb files that only run on Ubuntu for some damn reason on my Debiain system.
FUCK i understand now! the software i wanted to install had a .deb but its website said it was for ubuntu 20.04, no wonder it didn't work on a debian container!
i'll try this RIGHT NOW, hope it works!
it didn't work, but i soon found out by looking at it's entry on the AUR that the package is itself broken, not the distro environment it's supposed to be installed on
It's seriously frustrating. I had this happen just last night, but fortunately I was able to get the app I needed another way.
Arch User Repository. If you're using Arch, you get the basic stuff from the official repositories. But for most programs there's the AUR. They're often less polished, some of it may be proprietary. There are package managers dedicated for it, that also know to handle the official repositories.
I remember alien back in the day.
Edit: holy shit this is still maintained https://wiki.debian.org/Alien
Just switched a couple of my systems from Pop and Fedora (gnome) to Debian 12 w/ KDE Plasma.
All in l I like it. I don’t like where Canonical or RedHat are moving, for the FOSS consumer. Canonical is making huge strides as an enterprise distro but for home use I’ve really moved away from it since Unity.
Originally I went Fedora because my office was a RHEL shop but we’re moving towards Ubuntu.
I'm a light Linux user with windows 11 on my work dev machine.
I started using Linux Mint and it's the right speed for me. Switched to Mint LMDE 6. It's smooth.
Thankfully RHEL/Centos/Fedora also get attention thanks to the large corporate influence.
Anything else can just be compiled from scratch, after spending 6 hours trying to figure out what ajfiwn-0-libs-dev is in redhat land, only to find out it was libfiwn-devel all along.
Nobody needs a website, literally just dnf install "pkgconfig(libfoo-1)" or dnf install /usr/include/fooheader.h. Most sane package manager ever.
That's a thing?? Amazing, I just found out about this not long ago, now seeing that being integrated in the package manager too is next level!
It’s actually just metadata in the rpms, nothing special. OpenSUSE adds even more like “typelib(Gtk-3.0)”.
distrobox: Tool for creating one-off containers of a different Linux distro.
container: A virtual OS environment that runs on your computer, but doesn't know that it's running in your computer. It's not the same as a VM or emulator.
flatpak: A tool designed by RedHat for running sandboxed Linux programs in any environment. Flatpak can either refer to the system as a whole (eg: "You need to install flatpak on your machine to use our tools") or an individual program packaged for the flatpak system (eg: "You must download the latest flatpak of Firefox").
AUR: The Arch User Repository. A collection of installation scripts to add software to Arch Linux. These scripts are not owned or maintained by anyone officially affiliated with Arch, so you can find AUR packages for almost anything.
So, the comment becomes: Stick it in a dedicated environment designed to run Debian. Then package it so anyone can run it. Then make it easy for anyone running Arch Linux to install it.
flatpak... is unrelated to redhat, at least at the moment
it was initially made as a side project by a person who worked at red hat on containers, nowadays it's developed by freedesktop.org
That's still just mid level. Cool people codes everything from scratch by just looking at some pictures
Only n00bs code their programs from scratch. Cool people build their own kernel, OS, compiler, and coding language, and they already have that program built in.
Only n00bs build their own kernel, OS, compiler, and coding language, and they already have that program built in. Cool people create their own universe, with different laws of physics and constants, then they make it act as a whole computing entity capable of anything, it then creates a simulation in which we discuss this stuff.
Laughs in soldering logic gates out of vacuum tubes.
You amateurs and your software, real programmers work in lead and tin.
That's nothing, only n00bs do that. Cool people code in binary; the real programming language.
I don't know what the Linux community's consensus on appimages are, but I wouldn't mind if people made more appimages because, for the few distros I've used, appimages just usually work.
AppImages are definitely convient to use. However the two issues I have with them are that there's no easy way to find them (eg flathub) and they're not automatically integrated with the DE. Requiring a tool that manages AppImages to make it easier.
Appimages are supposed to be distributed the same way Windows and Mac software is distributed, that's kind of the point.
As for management, I agree distros should ship with an appimage manager.
I was gonna say "has no one in here heard of alien?". I've rarely ever had to use it... because I use Arch.
Arch is viable because the AUR is full of converted debs and package managers keep things up to date. Most distros have a method to install this kind of software but honestly universal out of the box flatpak support can’t come soon enough for consumer distros. We need canonical to give up on snap for Ubuntu desktop
Debtap is suprisingly easy to use after switching to arch (highly recommend), but i actually love .deb files. Obviously it's a slight risk to the user in the similar way dot EXE's can be for windows , but they really do simplify package management for when you're newer to linux.
BlendOS Will let you install virtually any package format through containerization, but it shows up just as if it was a native app. It's pretty neat to see and I hope more distros adopt this
We don't have this kind of weakness on Arch. Apes together strong. Porting magic language to our world.
I'm on Gentoo for example. I can write an ebuild to automatically download said deb, extract it, install it with the package manager... And if the site has any semblance of organization involved, I can write one ebuild that will always download the version specified in its name, so when there is an update, I can copy the ebuild, change its name to new version and if the dependencies or structure didn't change, it will install just fine without any work.
I am quite comfortable finding my way around ArchLinux, and recently decided to give Gentoo a try. I didn't expect it to be that much harder but all the cflags, emerge, conflicts and updates feels like black magic. I guess that if you know your way around Gentoo, reverse-engineering a deb file is not a real challenge. However I'm assuming that most Linux users would hope for a less involved solution.
- Incredibly old and likely no longer updated packages
- the devs are expected to backport their security fixes to these packages, which can create an outrageous amount of work
I don't understand why would people not be on debian does not compute
I don't understand why someone would want to be on Debian, what actual advantage does it have.
Stability, slow changes, predictable, strong history, lots of distributions are based on it, the list goes on and on. I don't use it but it's kinda stupid to question it's relevant qualities considering how much it's brought to the Linux community.
Also don't forget that Debian is completely community driven, unlike Redhat's distros which face some controversy.
Relax, guys, Debian and not Debian both have their pros and cons. The variety of options is what's so beautiful about Linux.
If it is only available as a .deb, it is probably targeting Ubuntu specifically.
Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian and uses the same package format. Ubuntu is much more popular though and the packages are not completely compatible.
If it is only available as a .deb, it is probably targeting Ubuntu specifically.
Did you mean versus another Debian derivative like PopOS, or versus a non-Debian derivative like Fedora, etc.?