For the first time in years, I'm seriously looking at other distros. But only within my Debian family, and that excludes *buntus. In the other Debian-based distro I'm looking at, can I expect to get away with using both distros' sets of repositories, or is that just ill-advised?

I think I may have tried it once back when I had been using Linux for only a few years, but that was a very long time ago and I don't remember whether it led to problems. (I'm really no regular distro explorer, much less a distro-hopper. I've used my current distro for 7.5 years to the exclusion of others, and the previous one for 5 years.)

If you install packages from two different distributions I would expect you to run into dependency problems.

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Thought so. If I try anyway to see what happens, I'll expect it not to work.

It certainly won't work, because programs need the exact versions of the libraries they were built against in order to run. You are unlikely to have these precise versions in a different distro unless Distro A actually uses Distro B's repositories in the way that (for example) AntiX piggybacks on Debian's.

A Linux system that uses different repositories is often referred to as a "frankendistro". It nearly always crashes eventually and then you may well find that your package manager goes on strike and can't get you out of the mess.

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As a former member of a Windows free software community, and having worked in the software industry, I have tried well over 100 applications, always searching for programs that perform meaningful work and are a humane pleasure to use. Truly great software is rare, but can be found.

A Linux convert of 5 years or so, I've discovered Linux to be a wild west show riddled with incompatibilities and, especially on line, truly bad advice. Many applications are crude when compared to their Windows equivalents, and the Windows arena offers many more pickings. I learned, the hard way, that caution was required when considering applications, faced too many times having to do a bare-metal reinstallation. As mentioned, the dependencies are the thing, but there are other issues, too.

Because of its large installed base, I settled on Mint. But Mint's repository proved to be a mine field. Each trial was a case of "eat me" "drink me." Perhaps every repository should have its own "Applications Czar" or a "compatibility department." With various revisions, things become incompatible and the whole exercise became a nightmare.

Before giving up in defeat and running screaming back to horrible Microsoft, I've decided to take a backwards approach, looking at the compatible applications that interest me, then selecting the distro to run them. Manjaro is in my binoculars.

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@Stoltzfus Why are you telling this to the OP?

What are the applications that interest you?

Unless you are specifically told that it's safe, mixing repositories is a good way to break your system.

If you want a program that your distro doesn't have the options are
> Compile it yourself
> Get a suitable package from the developers. If they offer a .deb version, it's generally safe to assume that they've checked it against Debian Stable and Ubuntu.
> Download a suitable package from a similar distro and try installing it. If it complains about missing dependencies, install it anyway. Then you can try to run it from the command line and get told exactly what libraries are missing. Often they aren't missing at all — they just come in differently named packages in the two distros.

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Combining repositories from different distro's is a bad idea. You are risking conflicts as one distro might have a different version of a software than the other, it might store the files in a different location or even use different library versions.

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Pick one Pied Piper to follow ...

Take a look at: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

https://averagelinuxuser.com/how-not...debian-system/

68k packages in the Debian repos. Little reason to install random PPAs. Just realized how funny/ironic that line was with my Giant sources.lists.

Personally I have 4 outside repos in my sources.list:
Vivaldi
Syncthing
Github-cli
Sublime

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I beg your pardon...?

...oh. I suppose you're snarking at people for saying the same thing when someone said it first.

I was confirming what I think that the OP already knows and one or more other people have said, too: the importance of application compatibility with the OS.

Perhaps, even more significant, is the solution path that I intend to try myself. This is to first have a clear sense about which Linux applications that I'd like to use as my daily drivers, and then select an OS that's suitable to run them. I'm also pointing out that, from my own experience, just because an application is in a distro's repository does not mean that that particular application is, in fact, compatible: the application may be stale and installing it may cause significant problems. For me, this has been a major deal killer with Mint.

I hope that this answers your question.

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Ha!

I pine away for an old DOS word processor named XyWrite, which handles like a fine artist-grade musical instrument. I mean that it stays out of your way and facilitates your ability to write fast as hell. It's command-driven. Once the publication standard, if you're old enough, you were reading XyWrite when you read The New York Times and Smithsonian Magazine. For me, by comparison, using Microsoft Word or Word Perfect is sluggish agony. However, I have to admit that I think that Libre Office has impressed me, too. A bit hefty, but it's an OK daily driver: a good solid application available almost everywhere in the Linuxsphere.

For a Personal Information Manager, I like the gold standard: ECCO, which, sadly, perished around 1999 or so. It works nicely within Wine, except for printing.

I'd like to have a text editor program that's optimized for word work and not a "programmer's editor." They're not the same thing (a set of four standard word-worker commands are necessary). And it must have decent (and I stress "decent" printer controls). Xed only prints smack up against the paper's left edge so I can't punch binder holes in the paper. This is an unfixable deal-killer. Admittedly, it was almost impossible for me to find anything within Windows that would combine these features, but I actually did (WordTabs -- a real jewel. Freeware, too.)

I like a sweet little free Windows utility named "Slickrun." It's a tiny positionable command line window that you can drag anywhere on the screen where you'd like it to be. You can enter DOS/Windows commands there or shorthands for your own custom command strings. Friendly. Powerful.

In the Linux world, K3b from the KDE community. I have been an audio professional, and this is the only Linux optical disk burn application that gives me a few "must-have" features that I was used to from a few (but not all) Windows applications. These are sensible abilities:
- K3b can reveal who actually made the blank disk, as opposed to the retail brand name. For example, Maxell's most durable blank disks were not made by Maxell, but by Taiyo Yuden. Fuji probably just bought them on the spot market.
- K3b can reveal the blank disk's chemistry: there are a few different formulations: some have a short "use-by" life. Others are more archival. Will your disk still play in five years?
- K3b can be switched to hold the disk inside the drive when it's finished burning instead of spitting out the tray, allowing the disk to sit there gathering dust.
- K3b can compare before and after to ensure that your copy is good.
This is the only disk burn program that I've found in Linux that can give me these horse-sense features.

And I'd really like a sound utility (they exist for Windows) that can intercept sound, not as a digital file, but as analog audio as it passes through your computer's audio circuitry, and then can save this audio as a digital file. Uncompressed (or lossless), not just lossy .mp3, with decent record level metering and adjustment. This can allow me to save any sound that I can hear on my machine. There may already be Firefox extensions that can do this: I haven't explored them yet. I think that one of them can only save to MP3 at one setting (pity). Dunno yet.

There's more that I can' t recall right now. Thanks for asking.

So, this is what comes to my mind

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