I'm still running BH8, too - although I have totally upgraded KDE (which I see I need to do again) and most of the apps (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, etc.) that I use all the time. It works fine, so I might wait until BHXII comes out before I start over.

(And apart from my /home partition, that's what installing BHX would be, starting over. Unfortunately, there isn't yet an "upgrade" option.)

FYI, I've got some hard disk space to play with, so I tried SuSE (network install) and then Mandrakelinux. They're both OK. Mandrakelinux is still installed on my extra partition.

You can install apt-get on SuSE, but I didn't keep it around long enough to see how well it works. With Mandrakelinux, they use something called "urpmi" to grab packages from repositories and resolve dependencies (Easy Urpmi configuration page here).

The annoying thing about Mandrakelinux is that they're always after you to pay them money. Which is understandable; they're a publicly-traded company. But it'd be nice not to have to cough up money in order just to get security-related fixes. You don't have to with SuSE.

Which leads to a question: How does one know when Debian Sid packages have been released to fix security problems?

And another question: Is there a Debian equivalent to ZoneAlarm or Kerio Personal Firewall? I'm lazy and don't particularly want to learn the ins and outs of iptables/ipchains or whatever it's called, but I feel like I'm sort of naked without a firewall in Linux (even though I'm behind a NAT box).