i got bored of how stable fedora is so im going with debian.

here are some things. will update more but i'm experimenting.

outdated packages

a couple options:

• flatpaks, they're the easiest.
• distrobox, decently easy, basically runs a distro inside a container and runs packages in there.
• self-compiling, as long as you have the packages then you're good.

flatpak setup

for flathub, you should add repositories with the --user parameter, otherwise it will add flathub as a system repository, install flatpaks as system packages, and require a password for every install. inconvenient.

flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

ive seen the desktop portal broken for some flatpaks (in terms of passing directories), you can use flatseal to tweak permissions and allow access to the folders.

distrobox

distrobox creates containers of different distro with other software like podman or docker and just lets you use another distro with decent integration with the system.

sudo apt install distrobox

create a container

distrobox create name -i image-link.com/distro

name is the container name

image-link.com/distro is a link to the container image (distro) you want to use. by default it makes a fedora container, which isn't half bad but i think it's a bit old (version 36 i believe)

and this is where distrobox is really good. the distrobox-export command.

inside a container, you can export any app or binary as a shortcut to run it from the host system

for apps (usually graphical application with .desktop files), run from inside the container:

distrobox-export --app app-name

for binaries (standalone executables, usually commandline programs)

distrobox-export --bin /directory/of/binary --export-path $HOME/.local/bin

--export-path is where the shortcut will be placed, putting it in ~/.local/bin/ folder lets you run the executable locally.

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