Since I didn't have a lot of stuff on my mind for a cou­ple of days I de­cid­ed to screw up my De­bian sys­tem some more by go­ing for a com­piled from source KDE 4.1. I've enough ex­pe­ri­ence with open source stuff to be not very op­ti­mistic about get­ting it all work­ing in the end. Be­fore you know it you are up to your waist in de­pen­den­cies and if one of them fails it's over. While I do ad­mire the com­mu­ni­ty for re­leas­ing open source pack­ages like KDE, build­ing from source shows that it's a lot eas­i­er to just buy a Mac. The main is­sue is that the cur­rent state of de­vel­op­ment means for every lit­tle piece of func­tion­al­i­ty there is a li­brary, and they all have an API, and the chance that the whole cas­cade of used li­braries col­laps­es due to one in­com­pat­i­bil­i­ty be­tween ver­sions of a li­brary is way to big. Li­braries get more spe­cial­ized, eas­i­er to main­tain due to the use of oth­er spe­cial­ized li­braries, but be­yond one li­brary de­pend­ing on an­oth­er a big project like KDE is just to vul­ner­a­ble to in­com­pat­i­bil­i­ties be­tween hun­dreds of used li­braries. In the end - af­ter a lot of tar xvzf && ./con­fig­ure && make && make in­stall - I got some­thing work­ing which looked like a nice KDE, but along the way I got a lot of er­rors that showed some li­braries lied about their de­pen­den­cies, and ob­vi­ous­ly the in­stall was nev­er test­ed on a sys­tem that start­ed from scratch. Of course we can wait for the of­fi­cial dis­trib­uted pack­ages, but how open source is that?