tiotrom wrote:
3. use stable Debian: here I am unsure since I tried the stable one and I've see that it has super old software and I've heard Debian testing is pretty stable
As an Ubuntu user you may see that Debian has 'super old' software. I never used Ubuntu (well, 2 hours when it was relased), to me those packages are tested against bugs,
Testing, it's name tells it all, this is the stage, where that bug hunting happens, what usually is not in other distros. If you prefer stability, stay away from testing. If you search the forum, you would find so many posts about bugs in testing packets, or Buster as many call it.
A few weeks ago we compared on Debian IRC channel how many packets are available in stable Debian, mean was around 56 000. Propably about half are librarises, but still there are thousands of packets to choose from. You can do almost anything if you try at least a portion of those.
I've used pdfshuffler for years, pdfmod is also in Debian repo, as been showed in previous post. If you are going to use Debian, it's good to learn apt and aptitude, which are command line package managers. For example, here I search packages starting with pdf:
aptitude and less are Debian programs, which have to be installed before using, search is aptitude command, ^ means starting with next word, which in this case is pdf, | is a pipe, with transmits the output from command as input to next program, here less, which is a pager.
Output:
Code: Select all
p pdf-presenter-console - multi-monitor presentation tool (ala Keynote) for PDF files
v pdf-viewer -
v pdf.js -
p pdf.js-common - Portable Document Format (PDF) viewer - common files
p pdf2djvu - PDF to DjVu converter
p pdf2htmlex - Converts PDF to HTML while retaining most formatting
p pdf2svg - converts PDF documents to SVG files (one per page)
p pdfchain - graphical user interface for the PDF Tool Kit
p pdfcrack - PDF files password cracker
p pdfcube - PDF document viewer with 3D effects
p pdfcube-dbg - PDF document viewer with 3D effects - debug symbols
p pdfgrep - search in pdf files for strings matching a regular expression
v pdfjam -
p pdfminer-data - PDF parser and analyser (encoding data)
p pdfmod - simple tool for modifying PDF documents
p pdfmod-dbg - simple tool for modifying PDF documents -- debugging symbols
v pdfpc -
p pdfposter - scale and tile PDF images/pages to print on multiple pages
p pdfresurrect - tool for extracting/scrubbing versioning data from PDF documents
p pdfsam - PDF Split and Merge
p pdfsandwich - Tool to generate "sandwich" OCR pdf files
p pdfshuffler - merge, split and re-arrange pages from PDF documents
i pdftk - tool for manipulating PDF documents
p pdftk-dbg - tool for manipulating PDF documents (debugging symbols)
v pdftohtml -
p pdftoipe - converts arbitrary PDF file to XML file readable by Ipe
As showed, there are ways to install Ubuntu packages to Debian. But if you do this, IMHO it is not stable anymore, and Debian security support covers only packages available in Debian repo.
I know many books and thesis statements written using stable Debian. I don't know what made you think Debian might be better. for some Ubuntu is better choice.
EDIT: Temporary blockage in memory, changed 'errors' to bugs, thanks Hallvor!