apt install moode-player vs full system image ?

[ddscentral]

Before installing Moode for my Pi 4 music box project, I've decided to install regular Raspberry Pi Bookworm instead to test the official 7" touchscreen.
Then, out of plain curiosity, I simply added the Moode's cloudsmith apt repo (bookworm of course) to sources.list, imported the gpg key and ran
apt install moode-player

this has installed Moode 9 on top of regular Debian and it appears to work just fine as if it was flashed from an image. I did a few minor tweaks to get the Pi OS regular desktop back but it didn't seem to affect Moode much, it still seems to work as it should as far as playing media goes. Also, other apps like VLC and Chromium seem work fine alongside.

I wanted to ask, is there much of a difference between building a standalone Moode image versus simply installing the "moode-player" package from apt repos on top of a fresh installation of Raspberry Pi OS ? 
Emphasis on "fresh installation".
 
The only thing I've noticed so far was missing xinitrc in user's home directory to run the local UI. Which I do not need, since I have a working desktop (I use a launcher instead to run the UI as a web app). Perhaps there are more things missing but I didn't dig that deep.

I could dig into build scripts myself to find out myself, but I thought it would be much easier to simply ask here.

[Tim Curtis]

In the Bookworm thread look for latest pre release post. It contains instructions for installing the moode-player deb package directly on fresh RaspiOS Bookworm Lite.
https://moodeaudio.org/forum/showthread....8#pid54128

This process can produce a result identical to the pre-made image providing Bookworm Lite after apt upgrade is identical to the apt upgraded Bookworm Lite used to build the image at that point in time.

If the moode-player deb package is installed on RaspiOS Bookworm (the desktop version of RaspiOS), I would imagine there will be conflicts between the moode managed files and configs and those managed by RaspiOS desktop.

Desktop RaspiOS is not something we test on so I don't really have a good sense of its configs.

[bitlab]

The only way to always garantee a correct working offical release moode-player is using the image for installation!!!

When installing the moode-player as package it will download a lot of deps. The latest available version of a dep will be used.
This will not be necessary the correct version; During development the repo will contain newer versions of deps for an upcoming moode-player version that can break your installation.

The image build process garantees that specific versions, for the ones it concerns, of moode related deps are installed.

So yes there is a difference.

[Tim Curtis]

The only way to always garantee a correct working offical release moode-player is using the image for installation!!!

When installing the moode-player as package it will download a lot of deps. The latest available version of a dep will be used.
This will not be necessary the correct version; During development the repo will contain newer versions of deps for an upcoming moode-player version that can break your installation.

The image build process garantees that specific versions, for the ones it concerns, of moode related deps are installed.

So yes there is a difference.

Right. I forgot about the specified package versions in stage 3 of the image build and that the CS repo can always contain newer packages as development progresses beyond a given release.

Disregard my previous post! Except for the remarks about RaspiOS Desktop, which we don't test.

[ddscentral]

Thank you for your responses.
I do understand I should not expect any kind of support with my setup, just asking how different it is from a normal setup supplied in the images. I do not want to use the images since I prefer having the desktop for better flexibility.
Also, I'm not running anything mission critical here, just a music player box in a bar.
Moode is mostly used for radio (added some local stations) right now. There's a plan to rip our bar's old CD collection and have it accessible on the device. Or perhaps upload some tracks from my own collection. Not sure yet what I will do.

As for desktop interference, everything seems fine so far, I do believe there could be some interference from the dekstop with, say, Bluetooth functionality but I only use Bluetooth for audio input, not output.

[the_bertrum]

The other thing to consider is that if you are running the desktop and other applications, you'll (should) be running regular updates to keep the OS and applications up to date, any of those updates could break something in moOde and would move you yet further from a known working base line.