Comment by Flamingoat

Yeh. I'm used to using old version of RHEL at work so I ended up learning how to deal with slow moving distros.

I use the OS as a base system and most of the stuff that needs to be newer versions can be done by installing the binary to to ~/bin as it is added to your path by ~/.profile if the directory exists on Debian.

Stuff like Discord, Slack, Kdenlive, OBS etc. I install using flatpak.

Other stuff. Go, Vim (I compile vim from source) and nvim can stuff can be compiled or dropped into /usr/local

That covers most stuff IME. However I appreciate this won't work for everyone.