Software installation - more obscure applications. some not so obscure

[mahesh]

I'm thinking of changing distro to Ubuntu. One of the reasons for using my current one was software searches. I could use function or name. Worked well for years and could generally get stable packages. Some applications were not officially supported but were well maintained in the distro's repo's. Just had to find the right one.

So I upgrade and as an example quickly find I can only get an experimental version of The Gimp. Install it and have update errors a few days later. I've run Ubuntu on a USB stick and the built in search didn't produce any results for some apps i use pretty regularly. Another more obscure one. I have a PC USB oscilloscope that runs under TK TCL Does Ubuntu offer any easy solution to this sort of problem? Or is it apt get etc for all and are they likely to be stable?

I sometime compile from source - is there a simple way of loading all that is likely to be needed. C compiler and various libraries? If any other libs are needed I only take them from stable sources  usually causes problems if I don't.

Unusual but have changed the kernel in the past. That needs the headers. Not much of a problem really as would be asking about this aspect on here.

As my PC is a tool I would be running long term releases. That usually means that the latest greatest versions of apps can not be installed as they come out. That's ok but what about stability?