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?

    • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      Yeah and Flatpaks also exist.

      Flatpaks are probably the best generic solution for using an LTS release like Debian Stable on a desktop system. You get the best of both worlds: up to date desktop packages and a stable base.

  • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    10 months ago

    Huh? Install testing or sid?

    The Debian way is to install stable then change your sources.list to either testing or unstable.

    I call shenanigans.

    edit: what version was Stable using before 11Jun? 'cause it’s 115.12.0esr-1 right now.

  • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    10 months ago

    Never had issues due to ‘outdated’ packages myself, but then again, I wasn’t into the latest & greatest.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@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 months ago

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

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

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

      • snekerpimp@lemmy.world
        0·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • Vilian@lemmy.ca
          0·
          10 months ago

          really?, thats your argument “need to use an outside package manager”, anti-flatpak argument are each day becoming more unhinged lmao

          • snekerpimp@lemmy.world
            0·
            10 months ago

            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@lemmy.ca
              0·
              10 months ago

              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@lemmy.world
                0·
                10 months ago

                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.

  • ninth_plane@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 months ago

    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@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • 4grams@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

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

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    Kali: I have no such weakness!

    trips and falls on postgres upgrade

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        This is funny because on a laptop I had I did this exact same progression - I started on Debian, but it didn’t have the right kernel version for my audio drivers, so I switched to Fedora, but it was running slowly (probably because of gnome, it lets you choose so this was my fault) so I moved to arch (with xfce) because it has a reputation for being relatively lightweight. It worked better, but it took longer to get working with the unusual chromebook hardware.

        • nexussapphire@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          10 months ago

          Man a laptop new enough to require a newer kernel but slow enough for gnome to be slow. That’s an annoying spot to be man.

          • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            10 months ago

            It wasn’t that new (2017), it just had weird hardware which iirc only recently got supported without proprietary drivers by the new audio system.

  • Siegfried@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 months ago

    Ehm… im using debian stable, no website is telling me to update Firefox (I’m on deb 10, 11 and 12 in different PCs).

    Deb 12, my home computer, is on unstable and running smoothly.

    Debian isn’t “just works” but “it’s a freaking rock” + “open source hardcore philosophy”.

    Maybe I got lucky?

  • Olap@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 months ago

    Arch is where the cool kids put in the work these days. There 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@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      10 months ago

      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@lemmy.ca
        0·
        10 months ago

        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…