MEPIS Community Forum

I'm a long time Linux user, and Ubuntu/Kubuntu has been my distro for years (literally). I have always felt that Mepis was probably a good distro, and I think I tried it years back, but I was a Gnome user. Well, with many recent changes, the onslaught of Gnome3, the "Unity" wave I switched over to Kubuntu the past 6 - 8 months. Have grown to appreciate and like KDE. Well, at last I have said my good byes, and downloaded Mepis 11, perhaps on a whim but determined to give it a good go. Admittedly the install was a little rough as my Nvidia card has a bug, and I only had 640x480 resolution for the installation process. After 2 days of setting my system up from scratch (haven't had to do that in years), I can say, that I'm very impressed. I find it very difficult to work outside of a 'Debian' based distro because I like the access to a lot of packages. I have found every package that I used in *buntu to be very easy to install and use. The forums have been very helpful and responsive to walking me through a few things. Not only have I found every package, but packages in my old distro that had bugs, work better, and bug free! Mepis has not bogged down once not even through my Recoll indexing process! Sound worked flawlessly, no setup even though I have 4 different sound devices connected to my system. It doesn't even feel like I'm using a different distro. It feels more like the bugs are gone! Thanks to the devs for a great distro. I have always been leery of using a 'smaller' distro. However this one, though 'small' in comparison, is no step down. I remain impressed. Thanks for a great distro.

Shane

Hello, Shane and

Yes, rock-solid stability and a general lack of drama are the hallmarks of MEPIS. Warren Woodford spends a lot of time making sure that MEPIS is ready to go before releasing it. Of course, our beta testers deserve a lot of credit as well, but even the early beta versions of MEPIS are remarkably bug-free.

BTW, since you are a recent KDE convert, what do you think of Kubuntu? I installed the 10.04 version as a virtual machine and I can't see many differences between it and MEPIS 8.5, since both use KDE 4.3.

Shane, MEPIS is the original Live CD distribution that's easy-to-install on the HDD, Ubuntu just re-used the idea... Welcome to the forum.

I have bounced in and out of KDE since the 3.x days, but never been a serious user. Kubuntu, always seemed ok to me. It is hard to say, because I have never really used another KDE distro for any serious length of time. Most of my 'would be complaint's' are probably just my frustration of learning a new desktop. I never used Mepis 8.5, jumped straight in with 11. I have a hard time going backwards, and like up to date stuff. I didn't use Kubuntu 11.10 long enough to become a costumed to the new stuff, i used 11.04 for the entire time, or maybe from the version before.

Shane

Well, I certainly felt at home with the installer. :) Although, I think Mandrake (back then now Mandriva) had a nice point and click installer too. Not saying it is the same one, but do remember it as my first footsteps into the Linux world.

Shane

Yes, but MEPIS was a Live CD, Mandriva didn't have a Live CD at that time (2003).

Adrian, quit preaching the preacher :)!

Michel