Hello everyone,

So I making the decision to switch to Linux after using windows for so long, I'm using Debian VM, on a windows hyper-V in order to familiars myself with the interface.

So... the first challenge I faced was not something that most would experience which is censorship and limited bandwidth.

Living in Iran means that you can't access Youtube, reddit,... and because of the sanctions some websites just outright blocked us. The early solution to bypassing the censorship was the good old VPN from VPN providers, but in past few years, it's been getting harder and harder, where a legit NordVPN or ExpressVPN accounts, just do not work.

we've recently had to rely on V2ray, and other fringe methods of networking in order to bypass the censorships, and quite frankly I don't have the clue how they work even on windows. Currently I'm using "v2rayN-With-Core" with a big line of code that my brother provided me and it does a proxy setting change then I can access the internet properly through browsers, which is not a proper solution where still because 90% of the windows apps don't use system proxy...

anyways

so what does have to do with Linux?... well where the vast majority of the apps are blocked in Iran, and/or blocked by the government, how does one try to acquire the apps?

When I access the "Internet" on the Linux, I can't do much with it. The "Software" app on Debian which I assume is like an app store equivalent, is just outright empty. The installing I want to do through terminal, do not work most of the time, giving me random errors like "Package xyz is not available, but referred to by another package. This means that the package is missing has been obsoleted, or is only available on another source.", where I can't seems to understand if my internet is the issue or my lack of knowledge about the OS.

I don't even know if that's possible to download the installer, is there a proper website for it to search? What we usually do in windows is that we download the apps and just keep the installer for whenever we want to install the program, but I don't know how would that work in Linux?

what tools can I use to bypass the censorship?

The funny thing is I'm an IT "professional" lol. I'm running 5 Proxmox nodes, triple TrueNAS SCALE set up for semi-high availability and live back-up at work, which are all Debian underneath, and as far as internal (Private) networking goes, I'm fairly good at it, but then again, the main issue is not being familiar with daily driving it where I heavily rely on censored internet, which granted is not a common issue.

Thanks in advance

Many applications, when they have an update, will have a popup upon launch that tell you about it, and have something to click so that you can update it.

For some software, clicking on that will cause it to download and install the update on its own.

For other software, it opens a link on your web browser where you'll have to download and run an installer to update the software. their

I would have assumed that this was due to a difference in infrastructure, with some being able to afford to set up and maintain systems to allow the app to download and install the update on its own, while others cannot and thus simply link to installers.

This doesn't actually seem to be the reason as there doesn't seem to be a pattern to which programs do or do not require downloading an installer to update.

Some very small applications do the update on their own, and some software from massive corporations require downloading an installer (AMD for example)