The best expert opinion is fairly well summed up on the Debian wiki at https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian <https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian> . The advice given above is fairly blunt and matter of fact because the users and developers on this list have seen this sort of thing lots of times before. > Regards > Ramesh>With every good wish, as ever, Andy Cater
Thanks for everyone's help. I systematically went through every package and moved them to debian version if apt allowed me to do so. At the end I only have acroread from dmo and everything else is from debian. I removed mythtv also to get to this point. Since this is my desktop, I do not need to install mythtv and will keep it as close to debian as possible.
I do not have the same freedom for three other (debian based) machines I have (2 frontend and one backend) and it is going to be a bit of struggle to get it right. However, fixing my desktop helped me to understand dependencies better. So... hopefully, I will find the right combo of packages to keep it close enough to debian.
Ramesh