Can I use more recent versions of applications than what is in therepositories?

['Forum Post]

Ubuntu has purposely broken debian compatibility. For me is really a bad
thing and I have already moved my desktop pc to debian... Anyway on
linux it can be hard to install an app outside repositories to get the
latest version, that's why some people run gentoo :-)



I sometimes use backporting from debian unstable to get the latest
version of something, (just did it for vim) but it's a bit complex.



I think that if you don't have particular needs you should stick with
the version in the repository.


-- 
soul_rebel