BillibusMaximus
Debian is on a roughly 2 year release cycle, and typically has a 6 month (-ish) freeze leading up to the release. So software in the stable release will generally be somewhere between 6 months and 2 years out of date. (My math might be a bit off but hopefully you get the idea).
Ultimately, it comes down to how you use your system, and what you need/want from your software. What you consider to be “the things that matter” will really be the deciding factor here. Need the occasional newer version of an application or library? It’s probably fine. Need the latest, greatest desktop environment? You may want to pass.
There are a number of ways to install newer versions. Backports, if it has what you want, is the easiest and safest.
There are other ways as well, but depending on what method you choose and what software it is, you may need to be careful not to break something. (I’d recommend not adding random third-party deb repositories for this reason).
Flatpak seems reasonable, but I haven’t used it much (once or twice I think). I typically use backports, or occasionally do my own local backports from sid.
Snap and AppImage are also possibilities. I don’t use snap, and I think I installed something proprietary by AppImage exactly once.
If it’s not in Debian at all, then I need to handle that a bit differently. But to me that’s a different issue than the ‘old version’ issue that Debian is often derided for.
Anecdotally, I’ve been daily-driving Debian stable (including for gaming) for over 20 years, and it suits my needs well. But of course, YMMV.
My wife got a sleep headband with Bluetooth from some random Chinese company on Amazon. So far she’s been pretty happy with it, though she’s mostly a back sleeper. She says when she sleeps on her side, sometimes the headphone part bothers her and sometimes it doesn’t. So YMMV. If you want the exact brand I can ask her, though I expect most of the brands are selling the same thing.
Look up some of the Japanese lore about Tanuki (the Japanese name for the raccoon dog). It involves magic, giant scrotums, and all sorts of delightful stuff.
If you like anime, Studio Ghibli (famous for a lot of classics including Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and others) did a movie called Pom Poko, which is about tanuki. If you don’t care for subtitles, the English dub is pretty good, and the voice cast stars a lot of well known (for the time) American actors.
GPL3 has a clause specifically to deal with this situation [1]
- Use with the GNU Affero General Public License. Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the combination as such.
So you can use GPL3 code in AGPL projects. The GPL3 portion of the code will still be licensed under GPL3, but the network interaction clause of the AGPL3 will apply to the project as a whole, including the GPL3 parts.
You need protontricks and the numeric game id.
From a terminal, run
protontricks game_id winecfg
And it will pop up a config window for the proton instance for that game. From there, you can tell it to pretend to be windows 10 instead of win7. You should only need to change it once. (Well, maybe again if you change proton version, or maybe not. I’m not sure how steam manages its wineprefixes)