Since my HDD install of Knoppix 3.3, I've had too many problems with apt-get upgrade. After upgrades I've had to solve problems with Locales, Openoffice and KDE. Now after the last upgrade Gimp is busted. Apt (synaptic, actually) is telling me that Gimp isn't even installed anymore and when I try to reinstall it I get:

Some packages could not be installed.

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gimp:
Depends: libgimp2.0 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libgtk2.0-0 but 2.4.2-1 is to be installed

Now I'm sure I can get it fixed, yet again, but I'm wondering why I'm bothering. This is nuts. Apt-get is supposed to make things easier, isn't it? I know, from reading other posts here, that others have had the same problems as me. Is there a general fix? Would upgrading to a pure Sid system help or should I just dump the whole thing and go with Slackware? As far as I can tell, apt is about the only thing Debian has to offer, and if it doesn't work, what's the point? I've set up a Slack system before, and dependency hell wasn't any worse than apt has been so far.