Gutsy upgrade nightmare

[Art Edwards]

I am in the middle of the worst upgrade nightmare since I started with
Debian (that is, this is worse than anything in Ubuntu or Debian).
I was running Feisty on a Compaq Presario v5000.

First Compiz-gtk hung because there was a missing schema file
(gwd.schema) I ended up installing compiz-gtk on another machine and
writing the gwd.schema file into /usr/share/gconf/schemas so that I
could then remove it! The problem is that I don't remember installing
compiz initially. Where did it come from?! I was running beryl.

After that little fiasco, I have had difficulties with
texlive
emacs
xemacs

These are pretty basic Linux/Unix tools. How could these have gotten
screwed up?

Finally, all of this is within a context of a X installation that fails
because the greeter program crashes. WOW!!

Gutsy just doesn't seem ready for prime time. Perhaps a fresh install
would work, but that's not what Debuntu is known for. They're known for
a beautiful package management system that facilitates smooth upgrades.
If I don't succeed tonight, it's back to Debian.