A couple of days ago, I installed (a minimal) Debian 13 Trixie on bare metal. My first ever Debian install.
Having read a little bit about distrobox, i thought I might be able to combine the best of the two worlds: Debian with a stable base and receiving security updates plus Archlinux run in distrobox (podman) for those few pieces of software that I would like to have “the latest and greatest”.
With this set up,I’ll get a next to immutable host system without the inconvenience of immutable systems (I can still get to the root of the system with my sudo). And I get access to pacman (+AUR) from within distrobox. I can export the GUI apps which integrate nicely into the host’s desktop. Also, I can export binaries (like yt-dlp for example) to my PATH (~/.local/bin) in the host. They can then be run from the host or from the container.
For my “low-powered” usecase, I feel I don’t need to have always the “latest and greatest” for everything. Also I don’t need those more advanced podman features, like passing the systemd or other tings into the container. If I ever need those, I could easily deploy a new container with those features.
I think this setup could very well end up being my daily driver. Of course I will never leave the Arch universe for good ( I have a couple of them installed already on this machine) but for my daily use, most probably, I’ll be on Debian and Archbox.
What are your thoughts about such a setup, pros, cons, things to consider…?
I would appreciate any and all comments, suggestions, ideas…
Yes, you are right. I have already backport enabled in my APT sources.
However what dissuades me a bit from using packages from backport is the fact that they are not as thoroughly tested as the packages in the Stable, something that the link you have posted also confirms:
Backports cannot be tested as extensively as Debian stable, and are thus supported on a best-effort basis; there is a risk of incompatibilities with other components in Debian stable, so backports should be used with care!
More, there are packages that I don’t find in Debian’s repos but available in Arch’s.
My objective here is to have a minimal host system and as stable as possible on top of which I could install most of my user applications from Arch (or other distros which have images for podman/docker).
Depends what you mean by stable, I used Debian testing for almost 9 years, I had 1 problematic update ( for the desktop, system was still clean) during all this years. For a desktop use, I think testing is good enough and stable is rock solid
By “stable” I mean that I want the host system to be as reliable and predictable as it can get.
This, in turns mean that I would like to keep the essential component of the system as close as to the released version as possible and just get security updates and bug fixes for them. I don’t need new features for the basic components which build up the system.
On the other hand, when it comes to user applications, for certain packages, I would like to have the updated versions and new features.
I am not arguing against that Debian Testing cannot be stable enough for some usecases or people if they prefer that. But that is not my objective here.
Another approach could be to stick to EOS and use Btrfs snapshots + grub-btrfs + scripts or a GUI tool to periodically create snapshots of your system and be able to rollback within minutes in case something breaks. I’ve played with that setup in a VM before and will try it out on real hardware soon.
Debian is a great option too, but in case the hunger for fresh updates take over, I think Btrfs snapshots + rollback might be a good option as well.
I was suprised to learn that many people update their systems multiple times a day during the DDOS attacks (because they complained because they couldn’t anymore) I suppose Debian is a cure for that
