I wanted to start contributing to an open source software project yesterday evening, and they recommend virtual box to not mess with your default installation of the program and the databases it uses.

So I thought Debian would be a nice clean distro for developing Python… Gnome feels really unusual to me and I hate it, I guess I can replace it with KDE.

But I couldn’t install a specific Python version? System python is 3.13 but I needed 3.10. I tried adding the deadsnake ppa but Debian didn’t know the add-apt-repository command. So I tried to install software-properties-common which also failed because the package couldn’t be located. Someone on SO said it was removed because security but I mean wtf? So the solution is to add this package cgabbelt manually to sources.list but I couldn’t get it to run because I couldn’t verify the GPG key… Then I went to sleep.

I am pretty sure this community can help with the problem, but honestly, wtf? I am not a Linux power user but a data scientist who works on Linux for a couple of years now, how is it possible installing a specific Python version is such a hassle?

Is Debian just a poor choice for developing? The software I want to contribute to has many dependencies, they recommend Ubuntu but fuck Ubuntu. So I guess I can’t take something too exotic.

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    3·
    12 hours ago

    Especially on Debian, I would not be messing with the base / host system so much. This is why a VM is being recommended.

    My solution would be to use Distrobox to run another Linux distro in a container. This could a distro that defaults to a version of Python you need like Arch, Fedora, or Ubuntu.

    This is a good idea even if you use something else to get the Python version you want. Especially so.

    The big advances of this solution are that you get native performance, can see all your normal files, and have an environment that you can customize that does not mess up your host system. You can have other Distroboxes with other tools. You can delete your environment and start over.