Why upgrade?
 

I did it because it was free and I assumed Mandriva 2006 would be "better" than 2005.

I now realise that for me at least this wasn't a good enough reason. I was quite happy with 2005. It contained DVD burning software out of the tin and also decent e-mail, Internet and office software.

I could not get it to work with Yahoo messenger
I could not get WinMX working
I didn't even bother to try and get any recent games running on it
It would not shut down properly - I still had to use the power button.

....I guess these things are possible/fixable but not at my level of Linux experience(yet).

When I upgraded to 2006 there was a significant reduction in speed and initially no menu or facility to allow second user log in. I managed to fix the latter but not the former.

And I haven't got around to seeing if I can get Yahoo, WinMX or any games running, but these things aren't essential. Though if I could, I could finally say "Bye Bye" to W***ows!

The only benefit is that it can now power itself down properly ;) So I am asking myself why I did it, and think I probably should not have bothered.

Lots of folks on here are running old versions of Linux. I guess they are happy with what they have since they could upgrade for free.

So why upgrade?
Will new applications like the recently released Firefox 1.5 only work with the new kernel?
Am I missing something?

There are people who upgrade because they want to have top nitch software even though there is nothing amazing. And of course there are ppl who have what they have configured properly and is working fine (like I've become after 2 months of me fighting with SuSE) for them. If someone is happy with his system and doesn't crash or can run all the apps he wants should update only bugs, update fixes and applications that provide new features.

If your system is working fine and you don't really want to run bleeding edge software, then there is no need to upgrade regularly as long as your distro is recieving security updates. Upgrading any distro is a very complicated process and things may break, thats why most people recommend a clean install unless you are good at troubleshooting and resolving problems.

For me there are two main reasons to upgrade: 1) a later version of a particular piece of software has implemented a new feature that I would like to use, and 2) bug/security fixes.

However some people like to upgrade just for the sake of it, or so they can say they are running the latest and greatest version of X

Spider -
I hear that "Kat" really, really slows down Mandriva 2006. I haven't installed 2006 yet, ('cause I'm really happy with 2005, and like a few have said, if it's configured the way you like, don't bother), but I hear that the solution is to uninstall Kat. Then you'll find that 2006 boots noticably faster than 2005, and you'll probably notice that KDE 4.4 is an improvement over KDE 4.3.
Newer hardware will eventually tip the scales in favor of newer versions of the OS, but for me, not yet.

BTW, Firefox 1.5 works wonderfully in 2005, and I suspect it does in 2006 too. It's a definite improvement over Firefox 1.07, even if you've gone through the trouble of optimizing the old version.

i only upgrade and tweak just for the sake of something to do.