Hot software requires effort on the user's part. The pace of improvement is astounding. Mepis does an admirable job of keeping up and you can save yourself much grief by just getting and using their CDs. By choosing preexisting partitions install, you can save all your data on your home partition. Backups and caution are advised, however, because it's easy to push the automatic "use whole disk" by mistake and this will nuke everything. Still, this is easier than trying to keep up on your own with package management tools. Keeping up with a Debian unstable requires about half the effort a windows box does and about three times as much work as a regular stable install. The goodies are so worth it.
First run of dselect has 703 packages updated, 540MB of data, including a new Open Office. Grows disk space by 54M. This took a long time and should not be attempted with a dial up connection. The cool thing was that repeated installs worked and it got there. KDE 3.2's release has made things a little harder, even with the new 10.2-5 release but it too works and it's getting easier.
/etc/apt/sources.list is preconfigured. This is the file used by apt, dselect and other installers such as Kpackage and Synaptic.