A general comment about Debian Buster, which I installed on a Macbook Pro: Numerous packages and programs that I expected, as a Slackware user, to be present just aren't. It often seems that indeed every package that I might need is missing whereas stuff I don't need is there.

Even Raspbian seems to be better configured and more polished than Debian Buster.

Having used Gentoo as well I'm accustomed to installing things ad hoc, which is great because Gentoo builds everything from source and that adds a degree of security, however Debian doesn't install from source so it feels like there is little benefit to this tedious effort except saved disk space which is cheap to begin with. Back when we had 20GB hard drives (circa 1997) having almost every package missing by default might have been a big benefit. Today it isn't.

But the a la carte model's annoyingness is compounded by the fact that it always asks for the Buster DVDROM and even insists the DVDROM is somehow not official or registered. Entering the command to register the DVDROM has no effect. Looking at the bigger picture, it is mystifying that someone actually thought we all still have DVD drives in our computers in 2020. We don't, and most times neither I nor most people have a USB DVD reader on hand.

so you can remove the dvd from the package source configuration. see /etc/apt/sources.list
Would be nice to see examples what is missing, what do you need, what did you try, what's happened. Otherwise hard to say anything...

Is there a log anywhere that shows all the packages I've installed?

that is the command dpkg on debian, use: dpkg -l (and see the man page for usage/details)

Installed packages are stored in the dpkg database. To see all installed packages:

dpkg-query -l | less

Replied to late...

Debian only installs whatever software was required for what purpose you chose at install time: desktop, server, etc. Doesn't Slackware install everything because it doesn't do dependency checking? Debian (and Gentoo) both do dependency checking so I would only expect software and dependencies that are related to what was originally installed.

Building from source adds nothing as far as security is concerned, unless you have done a code review prior to compiling, which only coders do...

The point is, Slackware has virtually everything that a package might depend on. So installing new packages doesn't cause any real hardships.

Regarding security, you can never be certain that a binary was really built from the open source code and doesn't contain spyware e.g. which some government required to be put there. It is therefore better to install from source, but I never said doing so was a 100% safety guarantee.

My list has 2780 lines, most of them being 'ii'.

I don't think that's the reason.

A full Slackware install does include a lot of stuff that other distros do not, such as kernel headers and sources, a bunch of text editors and x-utilities, and so on, but as far as I know (as a simple user who is not on the Slackware team), it's because that's what Slackware does and that's what Slackers have come to expect, not because of any concerns about dependency checking. Slackware does its own thing.

Slackware also does not "brand" stuff. The window managers and desktop environments that Slackware includes are as close to what their maintainers created as you will find in a distro.

Personally, I quite like Debian and have not had issues with the default software load that I could not fix with the help of the package manager. It has long been my second favorite after Slackware.

Just my two cents.

and we still have no idea what is missing (for you).
ii means installed.

Is there a reason that you can't just use apt-get and write a script so you can execute it multiple times if needed? You shouldn't need a DVD to install standard packages.

You would if you had not taken the offered opportunity to setup the sources.list during the install. The OP did not do this step or much of anything else from looks of it, to be here complaining about a distro that did exactly what he told it to do.

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I know, but it keeps asking for one. I like Raspbian much better than Debian Buster.

What is the output of "cat /etc/apt/sources.list"?
Also, you don't have to specifically use a CD/DVD if you can't configure it to use an online source for whatever reason. You can use a USB drive.