There's probably a better way, but the way that works for me is apt show <package> and then copying everything from the Recommended section into an apt install command

Edit: people in forums are suggesting the simpler apt install --reinstall --install-recommends <pkg>.

I find this preferable because it means the recommended packages get marked as auto, which means an uninstall will automatically remove them.

On the other hand, it forces a redownload and install of <package> which might be unwanted. If you want the best of both worlds, you're going to have to manually install the recommended packages, then also manually apt-mark auto <list of packages>—although that might make them immediately susceptible to an autoremove, so this might require some tweaking; I'll work it out when I have time.

If you want to always install recommended packages, add APT::Install-Recommends "1"; to your apt.conf (which just includes the --install-recommends option by default, behind the scenes)

As a rule I don't tell people to RTFM, because it has some rude dismissive connotations, although I will share when it helps me solve a problem I've been butting up against that would've been solved if I had just read the docs.

That being said, I do encourage people to read the docs, as others' walkthroughs can be misinformational, and are usually tied to specific setups or software and hardware versions. It requires learning how to wade through a lot of information to find the info you need, but the info is usually guaranteed to be the most current and reliable.

That all being said, I'm more than happy to help when people want it.

Con Te Partirò - Andre Bocelli
遙か彼方 - ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION
アイワナビー - Stance Punks
I Samma Bil - Bo Kaspers Orkester
A 67-Es Út - Republic
Papaoutai - Stromae

What white paper?

On KDE I couldn't get Steam to put my game library on my second harddrive. It would open up the file finder, then simply ignore whatever folder I picked (regardless of drive and folder permissions). I was able to recreate the issue on Gnome under wayland, but X11 works fine. I even tried making a symlink to the other drive in my home directory, no dice. Tried flatpak steam as well as valve's installer script; nada.

Interestingly, it seems that the "pick a folder" button in Steam opens up a contextual file search window in X, but just a regular nautilus instance in Wayland. I'd say that this is the problem (the regular nautilus/dolphin instance not reporting back to Steam what folder I selected), but it works for moving to different directories, just not drives (in both DEs). Same thing happened on Fedora, so it's not just "Debian is too outdated."

But let's be serious, if I wanted to spend a lot of time tweaking and tuning my graphical environment to be exactly what I want, I'm not settling for Gnome nor KDE. I'm not gonna go with Cinnamon, XFCE, LXQt, LMDE, MATE, nor any ecosystem. I'm going with a window manager and mixing and matching every single program/element myself.

I use i3 on my laptops. I would use Sway (because I don't have to care about Steam), but for some reason it's like 5x as resource hungry on these machines (constant freezes and stuttering).

But if I'm not able to update constantly, how else will I get the dopamine hits from watching the numbers go up?

so I enabled the boot menu in the VM settings, entered it and reset the secure boot settings.

In BIOS/UEFI? What settings does this affect/what changes does this make?

If it's your computer that you bought and legally own, tell them where they can install their Winblows 11. (The nice way to say this is to tell them to requisition you a computer or think of an alternative, because you are not going to use a personal device for company business anyway)

If it's their computer that they own, grin and bare it.

no, I would never, and you can't prove I did. And it's not my fault. And it's not that big of a deal anyway. And it's too late to do anything about it now.

full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac

You want Windows or Mac.

If you want a computer that you can do stuff like web-browsing, document/spreadsheet/pdf/slideshow editing/creation, gaming, or multimedia processing on, there are distros and utilities on Linux that make those more-or-less easy and beginner-friendly,

BUT it requires divesting oneself of the habits, behaviors, and paradigms of other operating systems and being willing to learn anew. Community-based Libre software is developed in an entirely different way for an entirely different purpose; because of that, it is nearly impossible to recreate the same software as for-profit proprietary software. One is made by a community hacking together a functional system that suits their needs, the other is made to generate revenue, and thus has to keep users dependent on it by trapping them in dark patterns and igorance of its workings.

If you just want "Mac or Windows, but free as in beer," suck it up, pay the devil his due, and buy one of those OSes. Libre Software is an entirely different paradigm, and thus requires a whole paradigm shift before anyone will be happy with it; on-boarding people who aren't ready to divest themselves of the old paradigm just leads to disgruntled users who blame you for anything wrong with their PC, and creates a market void in the FOSS community ready to be filled by corpo proprietary slopware.

Since you're installing Debian, presumably you've done the required reading according to their wiki, and seen the DontBreakDebian page.

If not, here's the portion I'm thinking of (emphasis mine)

Don't make a FrankenDebian

Debian Stable should not be combined with other releases carelessly. If you're trying to install software that isn't available in the current Debian Stable release, it's not a good idea to add repositories for other Debian releases.

First of all, apt-get upgrade default behavior is to upgrade any installed package to the highest available version. If, for example, you configure the forky archive on a trixie system, APT will try to upgrade almost all packages to forky.

This can be mitigated by configuring apt pinning to give priority to packages from trixie.

However, even installing few packages from a "future" release can be risky. The problems might not happen right away, but the next time you install updates.

The reason things can break is because the software packaged for one Debian release is built to be compatible with the rest of the software for that release. For example, installing packages from forky on a trixie system could also install newer versions of core libraries including libc6. This results in a system that is not testing or stable but a broken mix of the two.

Repositories that can create a FrankenDebian if used with Debian Stable:

• Debian testing release (currently forky)
• Debian unstable release (also known as sid)
• Ubuntu, Mint or other derivative repositories are not compatible with Debian!
• **Ubuntu PPAs and other repositories created to distribute single applications **

Some third-party repositories might appear safe to use as they contain only packages that have no equivalent in Debian. However, there are no guarantees that any repository will not add more packages in future, leading to breakage.

Finally, packages in official Debian releases have gone through extensive testing, often for months, and only fit packages are allowed in a release. On the other hand, packages from external sources might alter files belonging to other packages, configure the system in unexpected ways, introduce vulnerabilities, cause licensing issues.

Once packages from unofficial sources are introduced in a system it can become difficult to pinpoint the cause of breakage especially if it happens after months.

I would personally add that this isn't a case of "if", but rather "when". Even if it works at the beginning, all it takes is Mint deciding they want to use a newer library when they update the package you're using, and suddenly your system won't boot and there's no clear, easy solution other than "restore from backup."

Even if you know what you're doing, I would limit tinkering to binaries managed in the $HOME/.local/bin (and any applications that work as package management for that, like cargo, pip or homebrew) or packages that you completely control yourself (such as through git pulls and compiling yourself).

"Stick to the official repo" is generally the advice I would give for any distro, with the exception of DIY OSes that are intended to be patchwork, like gentoo or Arch.

THAT BEING SAID: I'm not saying "don't install without a DE and piece your desired DE together from their parts." Debian has a lot of DEs, window managers, and their individual parts all in the official repos; a lot of the difference you see between the versions Debian offers and the versions Mint or Ubuntu offer are basically just theming that you can do yourself without altering the system packages.

If you absolutely must install a 3rd party repo, just understand you are sacrificing Debian's selling point of stability, and waiving your rights to hold the Debian Maintainers responsible; and when your system breaks (which might not be for many years), it will be entirely your own fault.

Since you can run the apps (glitchy as they may be), nothing is wrong with the read perms on the drive. Maybe write perms or exec perms? But ntfs perms don't map neatly onto POSIX perms, so it's hard to say. Maybe try setting the gid to the vboxuser group id and see if that helps?

You might also check out the mount manpage and look at the section about "Generic Mount Options"; this is the more in-depth explanation of the "options" column in fstab, and the defaults option (which depends on the distro) can hide stuff like nouser, which prevents users from mounting the drive.

Finally, look into ACLs and how to manage those for interoperability across Windows and POSIX systems.

Best case scenario, fixing it so your user has all access to the drive with the user,exec options fixes your issues. Otherwise, you've just gotta do the learning about ACLs and POSIX perms