Today I tried upgrading my Linux desktop environment, as I noticed that a brand-new version was out. Long story short, I have the stable version of Debian Linux, and KDE 3.5 apparently depends on some libraries only available in the unstable version1, so things didn't work out too well2. It took me about an hour to rip KDE out by the roots and replace the original version.
But on the positive side, I did the entire thing — upgrade, removal and reinstallation — without rebooting,3 and once I got the original version of KDE reinstalled, my desktop was exactly the way I'd left it. The more I use Linux, the more I like it.4 If only my three favorite Windows apps had Linux versions...
1. Which would have been nice to know before I tried it.
2. Which is to say, it entirely uninstalled KDE and all applications associated with it, installed a few of its new libraries and then barfed because some of them had files already contained in other packages, and once I'd forced it to overwrite the duplicate files (nothing important, just icons and images), then it finally realized it didn't have the right library versions and refused to install any further. And it wouldn't install the original version back again, because the bits which had been installed had higher version numbers. So I had to go find those bits and remove them before I could go back to what I had.
3. Which is fortunate, because I've been too lazy to put my network drive mappings into /etc/fstab, so it would have been a pain to try to remember what they all were. I'll probably get around to doing that now. Probably.
4. Despite problems like this, which, to be fair, would have been avoided had I just waited for the new version of KDE to show up when I did an update in apt-get or kpackage.