PINE64

Hey,

just received my Pinebook Pro yesterday and started to update and install some software on it. Looks like the stock Debian OS is still Debian 9 (and there seems to be some limitations with newer packages such as Flatpak) is there an official way to upgrade the stock OS from Debian 9 to Debian 10 Buster? Or would it better to reinstall from scratch with the unofficial Debian installer?

Someone experience with flatpak usage on ARM devices?

Thanks a lot,
Andreas

you would change your apt sources to jump to a newer release while keeping the same kernel. ...i wouldnt do that, tho. the default os is hacked together. who knows what will break.

the unofficial debian installer uses the manjaro kernel so there are many differences.

i use debian sid arm64 using the manjaro kernel with great results.

You could consider this thread https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8487 which skips over Buster and goes to Bullseye. There are assorted problems with the files it relies on this early, but going this route then doing the update/upgrade bit should move you toward something more stable looking forward. And you won't have to replace it so soon. There is the option of installing Buster this way now.

FYI, I was able to do this via the usual strategy of replacing "stretch" with "sid" in /etc/apt/sources.list, and get an apparently stable system. as a warning, this did require a great deal if finagling with dependencies (eg, packages trying to overwrite other packages which needed to be purged, etc). it also somehow wiped out my mate installation, which i was fine with since i prefer xfce anyway?