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.
use something like uv to install whatever python version you want and set up a venv with it. that way you can have project-specific python versions.
Seconding uv and adding docker-compose for running dev DBs/services as my recommendation
If you're into that sort of setup, you might appreciate testcontainers.
If you've already got Docker available, testcontainers is awesome!!
I like little SQLite in-memory DBs for testing sometimes but just accepted the annoying friction of a slightly different SQL dialect (typically use PG). Testcontainers was a "have my cake and eat it too" situation, really like it.