Oh, also, you may some some habits that you can dispense with, such as looking around the internet for your software instead of your distribution. Debian has everything, pretty much, try the Debian repos first. And don't willy-nilly add repos to Debian without knowing what you're doing ... there are official backports and those are fine, but generally if you really need something newer than stable has, you can add the source repos from unstable, get the source debs and it's dependencies, then re-locate (so they can't disturb anything else and won't trigger removing the current versions) and recompile them. This gets a little unworkable with apps that have huge and non-trivial dependencies (e.g., whole desktop environments, some desktop apps), but generally works. These things can be accomplished in a few commands with a little upfront work. Debian's package source building utilities go far beyond what yum does.