I recently moved my work machine from Windows to Linux and chose Debian Trixie + KDE Plasma for the stability. The advice is that if stability is your priority, you should try to avoid breaking Debian. I understand that adding third-party sources can cause dependencies conflicts, and must be avoided at all costs. I also understand that Flatpaks, AppImages, Snaps, and Docker/Podman images are safe because they don’t interfere with the system dependencies. So far, so good. What I don’t understand is what happens with other ways of installing software (eg .deb, tarballs).
I know it’s a contentious subject but if stability is the priority, how would you rank different methods? I may be wrong but my take is:
Debian repository > Flatpak > Appimage > Docker/Podman > Snap > tarball
To be avoided: .deb for Debian > .deb for Ubuntu > PPAs
Eg Viber is available as an official AppImage (with certain bugs), unofficial flatpak (with other bugs), and an official .deb for Ubuntu (which is probably a bad idea for Debian anyway). Viber support told me they don’t support my OS.
I don’t have a good memory, because it was about 15-10 years ago.
I remember one time where the dist upgrade finished, but after a reboot most apps would crash with core dumps and I wasn’t able to use apt for anything.
One time I did the dist upgrade too late and the repos were gone. It would have probably worked by manually pointing at the archive, but I was a newbie back then.
One time I had some ppa for work, that blocked the upgrade and I would have to completely remove it, but there was no version for the new release yet, even though I needed (also for work) a feature from some tool that was updated in the new release. So I was stuck between having one or the other but not both.
But like I said, it’s all cloudy.
something like this happened to be too circa 2005 and it made me switch to debian; which stayed rocked solid until 2016 when the motherboard died.
Oh, yeah, I remember that time. Upgrading between major versions isn’t perfect, but it has improved dramatically since about 2017 on both Ubuntu and Debian.
Debian has also just implemented apt v3, which adds many basic http/s quality-of-life improvements to package downloading and installing (like multithread, better config definitions, easier key mgmt, etc)
I don’t know about Ubuntu because I moved from Ubuntu to debian 4 years ago for other reasons, but I’m sure they have aptv3 as well.