After many years with Arch, Gentoo and Co came to Debian for its stability and ZFS, which works just fine.
Very fast moved to SID, because of new kernel and drivers, but found issues with HPLIP, which is broken at its last version.
I can't spend time to repair or downgrade a single package, which seems to be not possible under Debian.
Frankly speaking Deb dependency system is most... special among all I know. It will quietly unintall packages, which
are in use and don't really depend on the one I uninstall by intention. The status - dependency has very special nature at Debian.
It is something, what developers decided to be so.
And above all that I faced new trouble. trying to stay with stable, which is stretch at the moment I have enabled stretch-backports.
But none of them are really working! I am not able to install anything from it by just entering:
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apt -t stretch-backports install nvidia-driver
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nvidia-driver : Depends: xserver-xorg-video-nvidia (= 390.48-2~bpo9+3) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
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apt install nvidia-driver
If I set /etc/apt/preferences.d/01priority to:
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Package: *
Pin: release a=stretch-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
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apt -t stretch-backports install nvidia-driver
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nvidia-driver : Depends: nvidia-driver-libs (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed
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apt install nvidia-driver
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nvidia-driver : Depends: xserver-xorg-video-nvidia (= 390.48-2~bpo9+3) but it is not going to be installed
Therefore my question is how to make it available for ALL packages in a plain and stupid way?
If I would not succeed in it, possibly I have to come back to Arch. I haven't expected it will be so much pain with Debian.
Every second packages (see postfix or exim) blame Debian for changing the standard way of working and config files, which
aren't suppose by developers. Previously I knew only Ubuntu is doing that crazy things like fixing up the working things,
but it seems the roots of such a behavior are in Debian.
Alternatively, I would gracefully accept any suggestion for a sane Distro, which I can use as server. So far Arch is my favorite,
but I was told many times it's not suitable for a server. Now I am not sure, that Debian is suitable for that task.
P.S. Example with nvidia-driver is just an example. No need to teach me how to install it. I wish all packages work the same way.
N.B. While discovered it's not possible to downgrade from SID to Stetch I am making a new installation with base system and
few utilities installed already. No mixed up things, no broken things etc. The problem has been discovered with linux-headers,
which I could not install, because of missing dependencies from stretch-backports. I succeeded in it by installing every single package
manually! nvidia-driver depends on xorg and became even bigger problem with broken things at the end.
Thank you!