Greetings

Debian and its derivatives have the most packages and sometimes we have to install packages outside the repos because it wasn't available in the our distros.


With Arch, I've been able to get everything I wanted from the repos thus far.

With PClinuxOS, I did had to install a few packages outside the repos because it wasn't available.

What is/was your situation with your current or prior distros concerning it's repos and how often did you have to use outside sources.

With Slackware I (almost) always begin with a full install, then install nearly everything else using scripts from Slackbuilds.org.

The only binary exceptions that come to mind are VirtualBox and Nvidia drivers which I install using the Oracle and Nvidia installers respectively.

I also install a collection of my own scripts and utilities from my own 'repo' but those don't count for the purposes of your question I think.

So, if we count SBo as a more or less official repo, then almost never. If SBo does not count as a repo, then frequently.

Hope that clears it up.

On my desktop:
Virtualbox and Google Chrome repositories
Google Earth (from the 64 bit .deb edited to remove dependencies for the deprecated ia32-libs)
ipad_charge (udev rules to allow higher wattage over USB to charge my iPad)
mprime (for stress testing my cooling)
eos-movrec (to record from my DSLR)
Various Second Life viewers (changes as versions roll out)
Firefox Nightly
I use Experimental for the NVIDIA driver and did compile my own kernel until Sid moved to the 3.11 series.
On my EEE PC:
Google Earth (sometimes)
ipad_charge
mprime
eos-movrec
Firefox Nightly

Prior to Wheezy (Debian) I used to use Debian Multimedia (DMO) for alot of things, now Debian's license is more encompassing I use very few packages from DMO.

Apart from that I use Mozilla Debian so I can keep up to date with the latest version of Iceweasel (Firefox), MATE-desktop so I can install MATE in Wheezy and the others but Debian is bringing MATE into the official repos now for Sid and Testing so that will slowly stop being used as well, and some packages that I hand pick from various other sources but put in my own repo so I don't have to have many lines in my sources.list as well as packages I make myself.

My main distros are OpenSUSE, Fedora, and CentOS.

The packages I typically install outside of the standard package management system include:
nvidia drivers
portland group compilers
idl
vlc
xbindkeys
google chrome
virtualbox
kicad (for obsolete distros, active distros are good at keeping kicad up-to-date)


That's all I can think of.

1 members found this post helpful.

Ah, I forgot about deb-multimedia. I've got a few packages from there though I think libdvdcss may be the only one I need. I feel an audit coming on so that I can perhaps just pin deb-multimedia for one or two packages.

Most of my packages come from within the Arch repositories, but occasionally I'll build certain packages using ABS. I rarely ever install anything outside of those options.

I'm interested to know what Arch has that Debian doesn't -- Debian being "the distribution with the most packages".

Debian splits many packages into smaller multiple packages. Distros like Arch don't do this from what I have been told.

How often do you install packages outside your distro's repos?

Never. With 40,000 packages in the Debian repositories, I have no need to go elsewhere.

never because everything written for linux can be ran and built with slackware build scripts do this means everything is my repo.
except for closed source.

I'm not sure I understand.

I usually go with what's in the repos (Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Sabayon repos). For Debian Wheezy, I went outside the repos for SpaceFM, but that's now in Testing and Sid so it should be in the Stable repos next time around.

CentOS is great fun in that respect! I've used the extra repositories EPEL, RPMforge, atrpms, and naulinux, plus Wine and Opera from their developers, and a couple of things from Fedora. Care and ingenuity are required, and a bit of luck.

I've yet to need anything that is not in the Arch repo or the AUR