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Using Debian Stable as complementary to Testing
(mander.xyz)
Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.
Flatpaks share dependencies so after your first half dozen or so then the overhead for the rest isn't very large. They simply reuse that 1+Gb you installed for the first batch.
With that said, I also prefer native applications from a .deb or .rpm when possible and for no proper reason other than being used to doing it that way.