It's been so long since they down-graded from deep dark fair traded eco organica cacao that I have not been able to by the full brand like I used to. MInd you, certain KDE apps I still find quite useful: konqueror, yakuake, kate, k3b, konversation etc. but I do miss the days when KDE rocked my desktop.

That's useful information about extra channels and community powered repositories, but then I'd be piece-mealing together what debian does by default wouldn't I? Part of my point is that debian makes it easier by default.

Using rpmfind.net is a pain particularly gathering together all the necessary parts when there are dependencies. Really a cave-manish way of doing things.

tar and make are very well known to me and I avoid them as an administrator whenever I can. That's because they don't make security and package updates easy do they? Compiling from source has its place when a particular app simply doesn't have a package or one needs a custom compiled version of some piece of software but it does require more administrative effort. In fact, that's what one has to do with RHEL 5 and derivatives wrt to Perl because Red Hat has a bug with their packaged perl that really sucks ass. i.e. can slow apps by 30-100 times. Wonder where their support has been for that package bug that reportedly has been around since 2006?