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"Syntaxis, you seem to have an odd emotional attachment to Debian."

Yes, I'm biased. I do like Debian; well spotted. :-) But hey, I'm extremely moderate as far as distribution advocates go (I can <gasp!> admit that Debian may not be absolutely perfect in all respects). :-D I also know a good deal about the distribution due to my interest in it, which makes me a useful participant in discussions about it (or so I like to think).

"Woody's selling point is security and reliability. In return, you get older apps and an old display. If you think that's a fair trade off, fine."

Fair enough; well put. One obviously cannot have a feature freeze policy without falling behind in version numbers compared to the competition. However, your earlier assertions that all the software is so antiquated as to be completely and utterly useless remain bogus. "Older" = 2002, not 1995 as you previously claimed.

"But, if someone wants Woody-level stability and reliability and the ability to rely exclusively on official Debian updates and Debian security patches and at the same time run the current version of XFree86 plus Gnome or KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc., they can't."

Sure. I agree with you that the resulting system will be *less* stable and secure than a system installed from pure Woody sources. However:

1) Those who use other popular distributions e.g. RedHat or SuSE, usually install un-official packages from FreshRPMs or similar on a far more regular basis without even thinking twice about it.
2) Many of the backports listed on http://www.apt-get.org are provided by reputable sources such as Debian package maintainers, and some software projects also provide their own packages for Woody - KDE is one such. This mitigates the risk somewhat, and the level of support remains quite high.
3) Additionally, only the backported packages themselves are affected - the rest of your system remains Woody, with all the advantages that entails.

"If you know about a site that offers instructions in how to upgrade Woody -- using official Debian sources -- to XFree86 4.3, KDE 3.1.4/Gnome 2.4/xfce 4/, Mozilla 1.5, and OpenOffice 1.1 please let us know."

XFree86 4.3, maintained by a Debian developer: deb http://people.debian.org/~mmagallo/packages/xfree86/$(ARCH)/ ./

KDE 3.1.4: get the debs from http://kde.org/download (duh!)

Mozilla Firebird 1.6.1: deb http://www.backports.org/debian stable all

OpenOffice 1.1, courtesy of the official Debian OpenOffice maintainers: http://linux-debian.de/mirrors.html

XFCE4, courtesy of the official Debian XFCE maintainer: deb http://people.debian.org/~madkiss/xfce4/ ./

The Gnome backport is still at 2.2. Nonetheless, it has a large userbase (requiring several mirrors) and is well supported: deb http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/mirrors.evilgeniuses.org.uk/debian/bac... gnome2.2/

There *is* a Mozilla 1.5 backport, but a) I use Firebird and b) it was by someone I never heard of, so I don't trust it enough to list it here.

As it stands, all those repositories above, whilst unofficial, are maintained by what I would consider reputable sources. I've also used most of them myself at one time or another. I would highly recommend uninstalling the Debian versions of the packages before installing any backports, however, just in case they conflict.

One fair criticism of the backports system is that it could benefit from being rather more centralised. http://www.apt-get.org provides an extremely useful service, but it would be nice if the Debian project officially recognised backports' existence and provided an equivalent indexing resource somewhere within the debian.org site. It would also provide an opportunity for better QA. Using only packages that come from sources you trust is a reasonable metric to avoid having one's fingers burnt, but the flip side of the coin is that adoption of otherwise excellent backports may languish simply because those providing them have no official role/recognition within the community.

"please let us know why an average employee would choose Woody if the alternatives included OS X or XP"

I wouldn't expect the average user to choose Woody. :-D The primary reason being, I wouldn't expect him to have even the faintest idea of what it is. However, I *would* expect the average employee to be able to use it to get his work done, once the admin had set up the workstation ready-to-go on his desk. It may be less visually appealing than other alternatives, but it's certainly nowhere near as ugly or unintuitive as you were making it out to be.

Besides, I thought you were saying that *management* are the ones who make the decisions? If so, I still contend that the choice that offers the necessary functionality (remember: a computer is just a tool) at the lowest initial and ongoing cost will be the clear winner. This means that if the alternatives provide functionality over and above the minimum that is required, whilst being more expensive in terms of initial outlay and/or maintenance, they'll still lose out.

To sum up: you correctly expounded upon a couple of Debian's weak points, but I hope that I've adequately demonstrated that these shortcomings are a) a worthwhile trade-off and b) nowhere near as problematic or severe as you were initially making them out to be, resorting to excesses of hyperbole as you were. Lol - but, whether I've succeeded or not, this debate has been so entertaining that in the end I'm not really bothered either way. :-)