[LUNI] Ever heard of SimplyMEPIS Linux?

[Francis Healy]

Jonathan Hadley <dermusikman at yahoo.com> wrote:  
I think Mepis was Kubuntu before Ubuntu started stratifying. I tried installing it on a friend's machine 2 or more years ago as an introduction to Linux (because i'm unfamiliar with GNOME), but was rather disappointed. It looks like they've adjusted their goals a bit, and may be a little better than my experience with it.

Jon
  I had used Mepis for a while before Sarge became stable (I believe this was before Ubuntu got started.)  I really liked the K Desktop, the fact that it came as a live CD with a very easy installation, and the great hardware and video card detection compared to Debian Woody (it was as good or better than redhat 9 in many ways).  The problem with Mepis was that since it was based on testing, there were numerous updates (bad on a slow connection) and some of the updates would play havoc with the system (one update of the xwindows system destroyed my desktop).  When sarge became stable, I tried to change the apt settings of one of my mepis systems from 'testing' to 'sarge' and pretty much rendered the system unusable.  Around this time there were some gaps in support and releases since Mepis was a very small operation at the time.  I switched most of my systems to Sarge since my skills with Debian had improved and Sarge did most of the tasks I needed very well.
   
  I would recommend giving it a try.  If its anywhere as good as the prior releases, you should hve some fun with it as I did.  The past releases had most of the good features of Ubuntu without some of the annoying features that have been discussed on this list.
   
  fh