> Ubuntu PPAs maintained by the third party software vendor; If it's proprietary closed binaries distributed over a PPA, I'd prefer run those in independent VM

> Ubuntu PPAs maintained by the third party software vendor; If it's proprietary closed binaries distributed over a PPA, I'd prefer run those in independent VMs (first trying the PPA on Debian - they're really just apt repos and can be added as suc), falling back to Ubuntu if its not worth resources fixing some particular one > as for most complex software (i.e. not just a static binary), due to library package requirements, the base OS-image inside the container almost always ends up being Ubuntu. I don't share this experience at all. The only situations I had where Ubuntu PPAs was the only nontrivial solution would be kernel drivers - precisely what does not go into containers. > your answer is "I use containers", then that's just a regress — as for most complex software (i.e. not just a static binary), due to library package requirements, the base OS-image inside the container almost always ends up being Ubuntu The reasons to move away from Ubuntu as base distro often don't apply to container images. Ubuntu images don't run any daemons like snap and are actually quite optimized for size (smaller than Debian, surprise surprise) > So now you have to ask, how does the person creating the container-image switch to using Debian for that? Compile outstanding libraries from source in the image build; injecting integrity-checked static assets as necessary.