That's the great thing about Debian, the constant libc upgrades will ensure that any spyware will break within a matter of weeks! :)

That said, I'm pretty disappointed in hearing this about Mandriva. I had always been under the impression that both Connectiva and Mandrake were fine distributions, but this is just beyond the pale. I mean, it's almost 2006, everyone should be doing automatic dependancy checking, and security alerts should be at worst a command or two away (or a click or two away) from being installed and running.