@g4sra yes, I find the debian packaging world confusing too (as should have transpired from my previous messages in this thread), but my impression is that for some reason the debian devs find it easier to describe the current process in their own personal blog rather than to go through whatever (presumably complicated) process to update the official debian documentation.

That 'sbuild' is the current "right way" to build debian packages is also stated in this blog by another debian dev (but his how-to is too vague, the one from Stephan Lachnit is much more detailed and therefore easier to follow for a newbie like myself):
https://www.linux.it/~ema/posts/buildin … right-way/

Thanks for the confirmation, that's the impression I got too, the guide from Stephan Lachnit that I linked in my previous message is based on sbuild and is fairly recent and he's an official Debian developer/packager.
pbuilder seems to have been superseded by sbuild, pbuilder seems to be older and no longer state of the art (although probably still usable).

That was my initial way of thinking too, but it appears that a lot of official guides are not kept up-to-date and therefore don't really teach the current best practices.

@golinux thanks for that link, it's a well written guide and there is certainly some interesting info but all those methods described are geared towards someone who just wants to install some not already packaged software on his on PC, not to produce redistributable packages.

If easydeb does a clean chroot build as I hope it does then for me that's far more useful than the methods described in your link.

The far easier way would be to use VMware workstation for Linux which nowadays is totally free (as in beer), but you have to register an account with broadcom to download it (anyone can do it, it's not restricted to businesses, and since you don't have to show proof of the details you provide you can basically write whatever you want...).

What makes the whole deb packaging process so difficult is that there is a bewildering array of packaging tools with overlapping functionality. Also dozens of how-tos that all describe different ways to do it. So as a newbie to deb packaging I don't know which how-to to follow.

For example the one suggested by RedGreen925 says right on top:

So it would seem that this is not the best guide to follow in 2025...

But by following some links on the above page I found a page about a tool called pbuilder that seems interesting:
https://wiki.debian.org/pbuilder

Is pbuilder something like mock that I should familiarize myself with or is that outdated and no longer useful too?

Just to add: I would like to learn to build deb packages good enough for redistribution, just like "mock" allows on RPM based distros, not to only install on the same system where I build them on (in which case getting the dependencies right wouldn't matter much).

In a German computer forum one of the devs of XLibre just posted earlier today that the soon to be released XLibre Xserver v25.1.0 will among other things include enhanced compatibility with older Nvidia GPU drivers:
https://www.computerbase.de/forum/threa … t-31077378

His whole post is very interesting and well worth reading, it gives a good insight into the very active development of XLibre, he says they are already a team of 10 permanent developers working on XLibre. To me it sounds like Xlibre has a bright and long future in front of it!

The post is in German so if you don't understand German run it through a translator such as DeepL.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are some Nvidia Devs involved or at least collaborating in the background with XLibre since Nvidia has always shown a preference for X11 rather than Wayland.

The main selling point of SSDs has always been access times, not power consumption, although SSDs do generally consume less power than hard disks when idle.

@rolfie you are talking about ancient hardware, I mean I still also have a GTX 750 from 2014 and that's still supported by the latest 580 Nvidia drivers, only GPUs from before that aren't supported anymore in the latest drivers, but even those can still be used with current distros by simply installing an older kernel like the 5.4 LTS kernel and using the older 390 or 340 Nvidia drivers.

I keep reading this and I certainly don't want to doubt other people's experiences,  but personally I have never had problems with them, on the contrary they have been very stable and reliable for me so far, and I'm using Nvidia GPUs under Linux since around 2007 or so, exactly because of my good experience with them.
I have to add that the newest Nvidia card that I use is a GTX 1050, maybe the problems are specific to more recent generations of GPUs?
Also I'm not a gamer (except for very occasionally playing some older FOSS games), maybe the problems are mostly with commercial games?

That might well be but so far they are completely irrelevant, i.e. none of them provide anything useful for which there aren't better non-rust alternatives available.

I checked my Devuan installs and despite not having consciously avoided installing software written in rust I don't have any such software installed (except possibly the kernel, not sure if I make use of the kernel parts written in rust or not).

If you are looking for complete independence from any distro then I can highly recommend Linux from Scratch: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

FYI, this is how it looks on my Devuan Excalibur install with backports and non-free stuff enabled, but I'm not an expert of apt so can't guarantee that it's correct:

user@vm:/etc/apt/sources.list.d$ pwd
/etc/apt/sources.list.d
user@vm:/etc/apt/sources.list.d$ more devuan*sources
::::::::::::::
devuan-backports.sources
::::::::::::::
# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://deb.devuan.org/merged/
Suites: excalibur-backports
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg
::::::::::::::
devuan.sources
::::::::::::::
# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://deb.devuan.org/merged/
Suites: excalibur
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg

# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://deb.devuan.org/merged/
Suites: excalibur-security
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg

# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://deb.devuan.org/merged/
Suites: excalibur-updates
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg