Besides which, that sidesteps my point, and another one as well. First of all, Linux versionitis is making things worse than they used to be, not better! There was a time that if you had a compiler and a standard set of libraries, you could download and compile any Unix source on any Unix platform with minimal tweaking. autoconf pushed this ahead by miles, and then these stupid version dependencies (usually introduced by poor programming) broke it all.
This is a good point: There are many projects under development, all dependant on each other, and with each one introducing new features and breaking others on each version it is hard for other projects to keep up. This is unfortunate, but there simply cannot be much control over the whole OSS community. I wouldn't say that these dependancies are introduced by poor programming, it is just that the developers avoid reinventing the wheel by counting on other people's work. This is a Good Thing, however at the speed the new versions are coming...
That being said, if you stick with one distribution, I seriously doubt you won't be able to find the software you're looking for. That is what distributions are for anyway, checking the dependancies of packages, choosing what versions are needed for each piece of software, and providing binaries. For example, both Mandrake and RedHat provide windowed versions of their package manager where you can browse all the packages they provide, and check the dependencies of each package. Unless you have specialized hardware you will find anything.
And another thing: Yeah Windows upgrades are great and all, but all you get is security and bug fixes, very little new software. Not quite the same right?
Each distribution has a simple way of updating itself, be it rpm/up2date/MandrakeUpdate/apt-get/whatever. Even the gentoo portage system is good enough (although it might run into the problems you've mentioned -- I haven't used it enough to talk from experience).
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This is a good point: There are many projects under development, all dependant on each other, and with each one introducing new features and breaking others on each version it is hard for other projects to keep up. This is unfortunate, but there simply cannot be much control over the whole OSS community. I wouldn't say that these dependancies are introduced by poor programming, it is just that the developers avoid reinventing the wheel by counting on other people's work. This is a Good Thing, however at the speed the new versions are coming...
That being said, if you stick with one distribution, I seriously doubt you won't be able to find the software you're looking for. That is what distributions are for anyway, checking the dependancies of packages, choosing what versions are needed for each piece of software, and providing binaries. For example, both Mandrake and RedHat provide windowed versions of their package manager where you can browse all the packages they provide, and check the dependencies of each package. Unless you have specialized hardware you will find anything.
And another thing: Yeah Windows upgrades are great and all, but all you get is security and bug fixes, very little new software. Not quite the same right?
And on the less serious side:
There aren't anyUsers should not touch the sources.
Each distribution has a simple way of updating itself, be it rpm/up2date/MandrakeUpdate/apt-get/whatever. Even the gentoo portage system is good enough (although it might run into the problems you've mentioned -- I haven't used it enough to talk from experience).