this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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Debian operating system
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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.
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For me it depends in whether the publisher has a .deb file available or not. If there's a downloadable deb file, I just install that through apt/dpkg.
I try not to use custom repos anymore because they rarely keep up with the named releases and can introduce library conflicts.
If I can only get a tarball of the precompiled binary then I'll unpack it in /opt and drop a soft link to the main binary in /usr/local/bin. This is how I handle Firefox and Thunderbird at least.
Otherwise, there's containers (Unif controller, for example) and flatpacks as a last resort.
I personally hate building and installing from source, but I'll do that if I absolutely have to.