Fair question.

What it boils down to is: Become part of the OSS community.

In my experience, there’s no other way, since the alternative is to be automatically part of the Microsoft (or Apple) community.

In other words, you need to make the investment into the implementation. As I’ve said elsewhere, license costs are insignificant.

The community is where you get help, where you find others with the same issues. You can pay the likes of Canonical and Redhat, but I’ve never been impressed by either.

Ultimately any solution requires support, just like any other tool. You just need to make it explicit, rather than assumed.

One thing that Microsoft does to ensure that you have support infrastructure is to continually break backwards compatibility in subtle ways that require you to open your wallet and pay for support.

OSS will likely run for years without adult supervision, but that doesn’t mean it can continue to work without requiring support from time to time. If you don’t prepare for this, you’re going to be very unhappy.

Kali ≠ Debian

I did not see an apt-get update

In my experience, unmet dependencies are unlikely to happen on a stable version where you only installed from the official repo.

The LZMA decompression errors point at a much more fundamental issue. I’m suspecting that the repository URLs point at non standard locations or downloads were interrupted, though I’m not sure exactly how, since AFAIK, apt checks the checksum.

If you must have something that’s not In your distro, do yourself a favour and install Docker and run your package inside there, much less chance of killing your system.

Source: I’ve been using Debian for over 25 years.

I’m talking about the reality of an organisation digging itself out of the hole created by projects such as described by OP.

I get the call from such organisations to help fix their issues and sometimes I can even help, more often than not it’s a time consuming effort (ie. expensive) to get to a point where the systems are in place to avoid the next catastrophe.

The reason that Microsoft keeps getting mind share and revenue is because there’s so much of that expertise around.

There’s loads of OSS professionals, myself included, but we’re a drop in the ocean by comparison.

In many cases an OSS deployment is the equivalent of “my nephew helped set this up” and it’s not helping the overall picture in the wider community.

If you’re going to deploy OSS, then you must consider the support implications before you start, anything else is unprofessional. License fees are insignificant by comparison.

Here’s three:

• A server with nobody supporting it for 13 years. It had a MySQL database with 743 columns. There was no documentation, served three organisations and hadn’t been backed up for at least 7 years.
• A server running a CMS for a dozen organisations that was running on failing hardware. No idea who built or didn’t support it.
• A server built by an employee 15 years ago, then supported by a “web company” who didn’t update it for 12 years, then “supported” by a Windows shop which was happy to charge the customer but hadn’t actually updated the server.

You’ll notice that I’m being deliberately vague.

All these share the exact scenario that the OP outlines. The organisations involved didn’t know that they were in deep trouble until well after the project instigator departed. No documentation, no updates, no training, handover, nothing beyond a set of credentials.

Right until your PostgreSQL server goes down and you can’t call your IT department and have to start hunting for a contractor, find a budget, get it signed off by management and HR, then on-board the new staff member, that is, after you advertised the position, did job interviews, after first filtering through the 700 … or two, applications, each plausibly generated by a ChatGPT session. Give it something like six months in a big organisation, less in a nimble one.

Does an “entrenched” anything sound “nimble” to you?

And that right there is why Windows is so entrenched.

If you want this for real, adoption of open source, then treat it properly. Consider the business impact of your absence, document the systems, train others, otherwise this is just another timebomb waiting to go off and with it any hope of weakening the Microsoft stranglehold on the company and its C-suite.

I’ve lost count of the number of such “projects” I’ve encountered in my professional career.

This is not doing anyone any favours, least of all yourself.

Given the “deeply entrenched windows” in the company, together with a presumably similarly equipped ICT department, how are you protecting your department and the company against your absence?

In other words, what happens if you get hit by a bus?

Source?

The fact that Debian is not on your list makes me doubt that it’s accurate or complete and while I’ve been using Linux as my primary desktop for over 25 years, I’ve never heard of any of those distributions listed.

Well, unless it came back in the last 25 minutes, it’s working fine in Western Australia.

Yup.

None of the above.

ARABIA POTTERY, Finland. 1960s RUSKA

Absolutely indestructible. Drop it on the tiles, cracks the tiles.

You can have it in any colour, as long as it’s Brown.

This seems relevant:

https://youtu.be/Fu3laL5VYdM

Is it just me, or does that seem … abrupt?

That’s interesting, since my list of addresses contains numerous ones that don’t exist and nobody here has ever used.

Interesting.

I see a list of email addresses.

I am not sure what you are talking about.

I have a domain registered and can see exactly which addresses have been compromised by what, without payment.

ProTip: the Ubuntu version number includes the year and month of release. 26.04 will be released in April 2026. 26.10 in October 2026.

What they’ll do when they hit 2100 is left as a rollover issue for the next poor sod.

ProTip: push your knee(s) against the sink for extra support. Initially you’ll feel a little weird, but you won’t care after your back stops hurting. You can also use this when brushing your teeth and washing your hands.

Source: Taught to me by a physiotherapist who specialises in pain management.

Given the massive layoffs happening under the Assumed Intelligence banner, the answer has always been: “cheaper labour”

Apparently people who actually know how to do their ICT job are too expensive, right until the shit hits the fan, at which point it’s “drop everything and help me, now!”

Organisations are no longer run by Founders, instead they’re run by accountants and lawyers who only care about shareholder value, not the societal or environmental impact.

When the bubble finally explodes we’re going to be looking at an altered economic and technology landscape, if we don’t self ignite before that.

Yes. Look up LOGO.