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.
Debian has GNOME by default I guess, but yes, try KDE.
Install nix, use nix-shell to define specific python versions.
Iirc, at least the text installer (I'm not a fan of graphical installers, thus I can't tell about those) asks if and which DE it should install. You can choose between Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXQt, and others.
Both the text and graphical installers do. You can also do it afterwards by installing or removing some meta packages or package groups, not sure which one Debian uses.
Debian uses
taskselfor managing specific tasks like the desktop environment. Soshould switch the DE from GNOME to KDE.