I've been using the same debian stable setup, mostly unchanged, for almost 20 years.
The most recent "new bullshit" I had to learn was figuring out EFI/GPT enough to boot onto a new thinkpad. If you prioritize stability and reliability over features, debian stable might be right for you as well. :) I'd avoid any whiz bang GUI layers. I have a simple window manager which runs xterms, which can then run firefox and emacs.
The next time I imagine being forced to make a change is to move to Wayland, but that's years away.
I used to be an Ubuntu user, but I've gradually become disenchanted with it. So I switched to Debian; I'm now on Bookworm (Debian 12) on most of my devices, but it behaves pretty much as previous versions did; I intend to stay there as long as it's still getting updates. I did switch from X11 to Wayland, but that was because I could go from i3 to sway with very little effort.
Anyone watching me using my ThinkPad would see very little difference from how I used a Sun workstation 30 years ago: the majority of the windows I have open are either terminals or Emacs. (Though I didn't know about tiling window managers back then.)
Would running a container of your choice (Docker, etc.) allow testing/developing tools that require newer versions of things?
When I say “things” here, I’ll give you an example. If I wanted to develop for Emacs 29 and work on most of the new flashy tech, could I do all of this in a container on top of an old-faithful Debian? (I’d be satisfied even if I didn’t get GUI functionality but rather just all the back end Emacs stuff.)
This question really extends to: does an older Debian allow working with cutting edge stuff inside containers?
Absolutely. Keeping a testing or unstable chroot, explicitly for the purpose of running or developing bleeding edge versions of things without disturbing your real install, is a time honored tradition, decades old.
Many, many people do this (to such an extent that there's light tooling and sugar to make the experience easy), including me. :)
Uh, I’m not sure. I’ve been compiling from source with native comp for a while, but I’ve definitely heard rumors that it’s getting bundled into the default configuration
Mostly just a good example of an app that doesn’t run on older Debian setups.
The most recent "new bullshit" I had to learn was figuring out EFI/GPT enough to boot onto a new thinkpad. If you prioritize stability and reliability over features, debian stable might be right for you as well. :) I'd avoid any whiz bang GUI layers. I have a simple window manager which runs xterms, which can then run firefox and emacs.
The next time I imagine being forced to make a change is to move to Wayland, but that's years away.