Linux

Noob question?

You do seem confused though... Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system... the Debian Stable distribution takes a very conservative approach to updating packages, while Debian Sid (unstable) is more up-to-date while being more likely to break. While individual packages may be more stable when fully-updated, other packages that depend on them generally lag and "break" as they need updating to be able to adapt to underlying changes.

But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability. But it turns out that there is no optimal balance that satifies everyone.

Mint is a fine distro... but if you don't like it, that is fine for you too. The only objection I have to your objection is that you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater... the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.

Debian systems are verified to work properly without subtle config breakages. You can run Debian practically unattended for a decade and it's chug along. For people who prefer their device to actually work, and not just be a maintenance princess, it's ideal.

Doesn't feel like that to me. I'll need to see evidence that that is the main reason. It could be but I just don't see it.

It did take off, just not so much on the Desktop. I think those infights are really just opinions and part of further development. Having choices might be a great part of the overall success.

Because the older alternatives are hacky, laggy, buggy, and quite fundamentally insecure. X.Org's whole architecture is a mess, you practically have to go around the damn thing to work it (GLX). It should've been killed in 2005 when desktop compositing was starting to grow, but the FOSS community has a way with not updating standards fast enough.

Hell, that's kinda the reason OpenGL died a slow death, GL3 had it released properly would've changed everything

Wayland has better support for some newer in-demand features, like multiple monitors, very high resolutions, and scaling. It's also carrying less technical debt around, and has more people actively working on it. However, it still has issues with nvidia video cards, and there are still a few pieces of uncommon software that won't work with it.

The only alternative is X. Its main advantage over Wayland is network transparency (essentially it can be its own remote client/server system), which is important for some use cases. And it has no particular issues with nvidia. However, it's essentially in maintenance mode—bugs are patched, but no new features are being added—and the code is old and crufty.

If you want the network transparency, have an nvidia card (for now), or want to use one of the rare pieces of software that doesn't work with Wayland/XWayland, use X. Otherwise, use whatever your distro provides, which is Wayland for most of the large newbie-friendly distros.

It's... complicated. Wayland is the heir apparent to Xorg. Xorg is a fork of an older XFree86 which is based on the X11 standard.

X11 goes back... a long time. It's been both a blessing and a liability at times. The architecture dates back to a time of multi-user systems and thin clients. It also pre-dates GPUs. Xorg has been updating and modernizing it for decades but there's only so much you can do while maintaining backward compatibility. So the question arose: fix X or create something new? Most of the devs opted for the later, to start from scratch with a replacement.

I think they bit off a bit more than they could chew, and they seemed to think they could push around the likes of nvidia. So it's been a bumpy road and will likely continue to be a bit bumpy for a bit. But eventually things will move over.

Because there is only one alternative (Xorg/X11), and it’s pretty outdated and not really maintained anymore.

For now it’s probably still fine, but in a couple of years everything will probably use Wayland.

My first step is usually to figure out whether the package should exist as a separate entity under Gentoo (which, for instance, doesn't have separate dev packages). Then I check the overlay masterlist to see if there's an unofficial package (which there often is).

If there is no package, I can package it myself (since I've been working with the same distro for years and can handle the basic packaging cases), install from source, get the .deb and apply alien or deb2targz and proceed from there, or give the whole thing up as a bad job.

As an Arch user (btw), that's rarely an issue thanks to the AUR and it's vast package pool :) But on the very rare occasion that it's not there on the AUR but available as a deb, I can use a tool called Debtap to convert the .deb to the Arch's .tar.zst package.

For rpm-based distros like Fedora and OpenSUSE etc, there's a similar tool called alien that can convert the .deb to .rpm.

In both instances though, dependencies can be a pain, sometimes you may need to trawl thru the dependencies and convert/install them, before to do the main package.

Ideally though, you'd just compile from source. It used to be a daunting task in the old days, but with modern CPUs and build systems like meson, it's not really a big deal these days. You'd just follow the build instructions on the package's git repo, and usually it's just a simple copy-paste job.

Finally, if these packages are just regular apps (and not system-level packages like themes etc), then there are multiple options these days such as using containers like Distrobox, or installing a Flatpak/Appimage version of that app, if available.