I love the idea of trying Debian but every time I try to ditch Arch for it I end up just giving up after not being able to find all the packages I need in the repos.
How do you guys deal with that? I’m not even talking about them being out of date. I’m talking about them missing altogether.
Install flatpak and/or distrobox and you have everything you need.
How does Distrobox work? Is it as simple a
$ distrobox install app $ app
And it runs fine ?
Think of it like a virtual machine. I installed an arch base image, and install the aur version of vscodium. You have to export the app, to have a start menu button. but it’s all relatively simple. It’s pretty well documented in their github.
I’ve been using distrobox at work (on RHEL 8, Fedora 16 based) for a while, but the containerization tech (it uses podman) does seem to introduce some extra latency, which is especially painful when using CLI tools such as zoxide, eza and bat.
I’m in the process of switching to Nix, which should have native performance, the largest number of packages, and guaranteed reproducible, deterministic versions.