For the last three years I've used SuSE Linux as my crutch, since it makes some annoying configurations very easy....winmodems are supported out of the box, YaST is a very easy GUI configuration tool for most systems files...
but I ran into something tonight that really made me angry. I have been installing gimp from source for the last couple of years without trouble, but with the latest 2.2.2 things went bad. When the configure told me I had to upgrade glib I thought that was reasonable, so I did....then tried upgrading gimp again. I was told to upgrade glib. Hmmm...I just did that. I checked my pkgconfig path, and found it included packages installed both from packages and source. Just to make sure I also installed glib with prefix=/usr, so my packaged glib was also overwritten. Still gimp tells me I have to upgrade glib. I tried to install the latest pango and atk, failing because they want the glib that I have just installed 4 times, followed by ldconfig and a reboot.
I should mention that this is after attempting a system update through YaST....I did a package update, which mentioned nothing about gtk, so it was followed by a system update. The system update immediately began installing multiple KDE applications which were never on my system to begin with, and had no vital impact on the system...so I quit the update.
This made me really begin to think about why I have been using this operatng system....I decided that it was only because I was lazy.
I'm looking for a better distro.
/* Edit
uuuhhhh....
well, I feel really stupid now.....
My PKG_CONFIG_PATH had /usr/lib/pkgconfig in front of /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig, so all the gtk apps I just installed were not being found before the ones previously installed....
So I'm gonna go sit in the corner and hope no one reads this.... */
/* Edit 2
I don't feel like such a stupid now...It really did take a lot of work to install gimp 2.2.2, even on a system which already had a decent amount of dev packages installed. I had to upgrade glib, gtk, pango, and atk just to install gimp and then after the installation, gimp wouldn't run until I had upgraded libfreetype. So I guess gimp2.2.2 is a pretty demanding beast,
*/