This article comes partly from my impatience to get KDE 3.4 on my Debian Sid box, and partly from the fuss about Debian carrying outdated packages.
Like many people I spent many years using Windows 95/98/2000 - Windows 2000 is where it stopped for me - and at the time I installed the OS and tried to keep it running as stable as humanly possible.
I applied the security updates, service packs and patches, I updated my antivirus software, cleaned the registry on a regular basis and overall never cared about upgrading window managers, cd-burning software or any other program.
As long as everything was running as it was intended to I was happy, and when something broke I tried to fix it.
That all changed when I discovered Red Hat and apt4rpm.
All of a sudden I had tons of stuff I could upgrade almost every day and, like many others, I contracted upgrade-itis.
Every day at least a few programs I was using were enhanced with new functionalities, bug fixes, eye-candy, or whatever the developper saw fit, and I liked it.
It was as easy as "apt-get update" "apt-get dist-upgrade" and whenever there was nothing to upgrade I fired up synaptic - an apt-get front-end - and looked for new stuff to install.
It all seemed ok to me and it quickly became a habit to wait for the mirrors to be updated in order for me to do my daily apt-get dist-upgrade.
Of course this constant upgrading of libraries and other bits of software gave me some occasional headaches and once even almost completely screwed my system but I was addicted.
Now I'm running Debian Sid, the "unstable" branch of Debian and actually my system is still rock solid and has never been this stable before.
By "unstable" the Debian developpers mean not tested thouroughly, but when you think of all the other distros out there you realize that at their very best they're not even close to what Debian Sid is regarding stability and flexibility, and the versions I use on my box are as recent as theirs most of the time.
I'm still doing my nightly apt-get dist-upgrades just to be on the safe side concerning bug-fixes and stuff and everything is perfectly fine.
And this is what brought me to writing this.
I've been wanting to have KDE 3.4 for quite some time now, especially since I apt-get upgraded it on my wife-s box, and she's running Fedora Core 3 - not the most KDE-centric distro around huh?
Well, it's still not there for Debian and that made me think, think about the times when I was using Windows.
My fellow Windows users and myself never would've thought of changing/upgrading the window manager, it simply didn't exist.
At best we noticed some differences when installing the next new version of Windows, and most of the time the add-ons were bloat and/or vaporware.
And we were happy this way, we used Windows as the guys who made it had seen fit.
And that's what I'm gonna do with my Debian box.
If the Debian developpers estimate that there are still serious bugs in the KDE 3.4 packages built for Debian I'll wait and I won't try to add some kubuntu repositories to my sources.list just in order to be able to have the very latest - I admit I toyed with the idea but I'm not gonna do it.
I'm running version 3.3.2 at the moment and it's great and running smooth, why risk the stability of my whole system just to have the latest and greatest?
Think about that before you do some silly things and have to hang out at linuxquestions.org to get your hosed system fixed by someone who's more knowledgeable than you.
Don't get me wrong, freedom of choice is great and experimenting is how you will learn the most but at some point you have to realize that the guys who develop the software or maintain a distro know better than you what works and what doesn't.
If you don't like the distro overall you can always pick another one, this is the beauty of open source software and linux in general.
