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Comment by cabirum | Hacker News Reader

How do you deal with grossly outdated software on Debian Desktop?

You deal with it by being happy that it doesn't constantly change UI/Interface/Features and break your workflow unexpectedly sometimes. Yes, you don't always have the latest and greatest and if that's a solid requirement, Debian isn't a good choice. But for a stable, not-going-to-change-out-from-under-you point of view, Debian is fantastic. Software you can rely on that's still patched for security issues.

Debian is really solid as a server OS. I wouldn't use it for desktop unless you're using ancient hardware. My days of using CentOS as a development workstation are thankfully behind me. I will never use a long-release cycle distro for primary development, the headaches that come with it are not worth it.

If you aren't worried about your system being unstable, just use testing. Or just do what everyone else does, and use testing on your laptop/workstation and stable on everything else.

> Debian is really solid as a server OS. I wouldn't use it for desktop unless you're using ancient hardware

I'm running Debian 12 (since the soft freeze I think) on my newly built AMD 7700X. I wouldn't exactly call that "ancient hardware".

Zero issue. No headaches for me. FWIW I'm running Debian since Debian 1.1 (1.1, not 11).

I'm dumb :)

Debian releases every 2 years. Each release gets LTS support for 5 years, but there is no reason you need to use it that long unless you choose not to upgrade.

Wait... whaaaaaa!? I thought it was 5 for some reason. Disregard! 2 years is a pretty reasonable lifecycle

I use Debian on the desktop with various hardware, both inside the case and outside it (various SDRs and data capture toys) and it works great for me. Just a data point, YMMV.

Debian 11 works fine on my Framework, I wouldn't call that ancient.

well it's designed to work with linux, which makes it honorary ancient

Depends on the apps. For most it's completely irrelevant whether it’s the latest release. For others, there’s flatpaks or containers (docker/podman). Personally I think people get too attached to bleeding edge.

I use it as a desktop OS on all of my nonserver machines, and it's been great. Obviously, tastes vary, of course.

I mean, if you really need newer software, then you can probably find a DPA (like Ubuntu's PPA). The PHP packages provided by Ondřej Surý come to mind as an example, which have recent versions that would otherwise be unavailable: https://deb.sury.org/

Alternatively, one can use OCI containers (e.g. Docker) for something even more recent, or software unavailable on Debian altogether. That way, you can have a very stable base server OS, with isolated bits of something more recent, feature packed, albeit sometimes a bit more unstable.

Those aren't the only options, of course, but they are pretty viable, depending on your use case. Personally, I also didn't see any issues with the ~10 year EOL of some of the RPM distros, as long as you care mostly about security updates/stability and not recent features.

isn't there a testing/"unstable" version that has the latest/greatest? I had heard it was roughly as stable as ubuntu...

It's "testing", not unstable. "Unstable" is actually unstable, and seems to be where people are actually testing things. I find the names needlessly misleading, although accurate, because "testing" is being tested to be the next "stable." "Unstable" is where people are figuring out things; they go into "testing" when they're pretty much figured out.

I've had an order of magnitude more breakage on regular Ubuntu updates than on Debian testing. That being said, I ditched Ubuntu probably a decade ago and it might go out better now.

Debian Testing doesn’t get security updates quickly, unlike Stable and Unstable. Hence why the Debian wiki does not recommend Testing for ordinary users.

unstable is a bit of an odd fit for most purposes. For 6 months leading up to a stable release it is frozen, so few packages are being updated, then for 6 months after a stable release there is a bunch of churn and things can get a bit unstable, and then for about a year it is like running a rolling release, albeit one that isn't as up-to-date as Arch. I feel most people who want up-to-date packages would be better off running Arch or Fedora.

There is nothing to deal with, outdated software still works, it's stable and you get on with your life.

Anything of importance has deb package/official deb repo (Chrome, Brave, VS Code, Slack, Signal, Dropbox, etc), so you receive latest versions. There is flatpak as well. Newer kernel and some libraries could be found in backports repo.

I use Debian with 0 flatpaks/snaps/Appimages, only Debian repos and few official third-party ones.

There are still some reason that you may want to use a newer version of a software when your distro is stable. e.g. The latest version added a new feature that is really useful to you, or a long-standing bug has been fixed in latest version.

I think Flatpak would be current best choice for these tasks if you are running a stable distro. But I think it would be good to have a distro where core OS and user application is completely separated, and can be updated independently. It would be nice to have latest application without fearing the next grub/DE/kernel/driver/... update might break your current setup.

> I think it would be good to have a distro where core OS and user application is completely separated, and can be updated independently.

There is nuance here. Technically, this is how it currently is, since the "core OS" is the kernel, and you can absolutely update that separately from everything else.

But lots of what people tend to think of as the "OS" are just applications (in Linux, anyway), so if that's the point of view, then it gets trickier. You can still update that stuff independently, but you have to decide what parts count as "core OS" to you and you'll need to update each of them independently.

True "user applications" are updateable independently.

> How do you deal with grossly outdated software on Debian Desktop?

Use the Source, Luke.

If there's something too shiny that I really need on my Debian, I compile it from source.

For example Emacs 29, with tree-sitter and whatnots, is just too shiny. So I compile it from source.

This is my approach. There's only been one or two times that I needed the latest version of something, and when that happened I just built them myself.

A Debian base with something like Homebrew on top, so all the user-facing applications are always up-to-date, would be basically perfect. Which, I know there's a Homebrew port for Linux, but it and its packages seemed rather more bug-ridden than than the Mac version, plus there were way fewer packages, last time I checked, probably because it has to support a whole bunch of underlying distros, Linux's culture around software packaging & libraries is... challenging, and there are simply a lot fewer eyeballs on it than on regular Homebrew. I think the distro itself would have to provide the separate non-system-software manager, specifically for that distro and close derivatives, for that to take off in Linux land. And it'd be a lot of work, to untangle that from underlying system software so the system packages could sit at a stable versions for months or years while the user-software updated on top of it.

[EDIT] And, yeah, I know you can probably get a similar effect with Nix, but, ah, no. I tried it in a VM a couple years back, and it's a hard no. And I was a Gentoo user for years, so I'm not necessarily averse to some pain... but no.

Was your VM NixOS, or something else with Nix on top? The latter is a fairly painless way to test-drive the idea without going all-in.

What I do is that the very few apps that I want/need the most recent upstream version of (Firefox, Thunderbird, Digicam, KeepassXC), I use the AppImage version of those. (The Mozilla has some other system than AppImage, but it works really well with auto updating, etc. nonetheless)

On the off chance that I need some library, I may use a backports mirror. But I am not needing any at the moment and don't recall the last time I had to use backports. Must have been at least a couple of years since...

I haven't noticed anything grossly outdated. I have some Debian and some Ubuntu desktop machines, and honestly I couldn't tell the difference except when trying to install stable diffusion (bleeding edge software with official support for Ubuntu only).

I also used to run Debian on my server machines but switched to NixOS - although I'm now seriously considering switching back to Debian since it has far less headaches and just works.

I've been using Debian 11 since after Christmas. Which outdated software am I using? Everything seems just fine as it was on Ubuntu 20.04.

I couldn't tell you, but since Debian 12 is moving into Stable you can see for yourself with a apt-get full-upgrade. For a little while, you'll be as close to cutting edge as Stable gets.

I'll check. The point is that software for web development is not installed with debs but with their own package managers (rvm, npm, pip) or meta managers (asdf) or docker so I'm cutting edge no matter what I get from the distro. Same thing for browsers. I downloaded Firefox from Mozilla and it auto updates more gracefully than the deb I had in Ubuntu: it suggests a restart and doesn't force it when I open a new tab. Chrome has its own apt, I think.

About the rest of the software, it's not very important which version I have. Actually, staying for years on an older Gnome shell won't force me to spend time to adapt to or disable new weirdnesses. Libre Office from n years ago would be OK. Evince, the same. Nautilus, give me the one from 2008.

Debian updates as often as Ubuntu LTS. And Ubuntu tries to force people into LTS (by not offering you to update to non-LTS once you get into an LTS), so most people using Ubuntu will have the same cadence of updates if they switch to Debian.

Also, things just work. There's no application that I need that needs to be absolutely using the latest version. The only apps I can think of that require this auto-update themselves, like Steam and Bitwarden (for which I use an AppImage).

FWIW I run Debian bullseye on the desktop and don't have any issues with any of the software I use, like web browsers and IM clients.

I'm not running anything fancy locally so perhaps it's an unusual case, and I will admit that I can't print from my desktop for reasons I've never bothered to look into, so the experience isn't 100%; but I prefer it to running Windows, which is becoming more and more like an OS-as-a-service-with-ads by the day.

I willingly use Stable, although if you want something that includes more recent versions, you want Unstable.

Personally, there's only been one time in the last decade or so that not using the latest version of something has caused any real headache for me, and that was a manageable situation.

> I willingly use Stable, although if you want something that includes more recent versions, you want Unstable.

You want Testing. I don't think people really use Unstable unless they work on Debian itself.

Debian Testing doesn’t get security updates quickly, unlike Stable and Unstable. Hence why the Debian wiki does not recommend Testing for ordinary users.

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