apt-get dist-upgrade wants to remove almost everything KDE

[Weevil]

Why would it, that's not what Knoppix is intended to be?

For the reasons I mentioned, because a good, easy installation is a good thing for a distro to have, and Knoppix has 90% of it. It seems like a natural extension, and apparently did to Joerg Schirottke as well.

For those who haven't even looked at installing Debian recently, I have no pitty at all

Who asked for pity? I asked for information. You could have as easily said, "You should check out the current Debian installation. It has really improved." Maybe next time I'll look at it, but yes, in the meantime, please keep your "pitty" to yourself.

If any effort were made in uniting Knoppix with a hard disk install, I don't believe that it should be in a way that compromises the basic Live CD approach of Knoppix. Perhaps someone who could identify actual areas of hardware detection where Knoppix can be shown to do better than Debian could either look at moving that technology into the Debian installer, or could look at capturing the Knoppix configuration information to assist the Debian installer (Boot Knoppix, be sure you have all the hardware configured properly, produce a configuration file that Debian can use when it installs). This would make a lot more sense to me than people who had not even tried to install Debian wanting to see the Live CD Knoppix changed into something it isn't intended to be.

I agree. And I suppose maybe that's my real question - why there is not a solid installation aimed at hard disk installation that includes all the great Knoppix stuff. I use the live CD once in a while to help me repair broken machines, but a fast, simple, complete hard disk install with good hardware detection, etc., is valuable to me as well.