Re: Ubuntu Migration

> So far I have not seen anything inherently wrong with  MEPIS except 
> with how it is licnsed.  Is this the case?

No.

I have several other problems with it as well. I had mepis installed 
for about 2 weeks, here are my main complaints:

1) Security updates. It is based, or at least was when i was looking at 
it, on debian unstable. I used to run debian unstable on my powerbook 
and found it to be very unstable from time to time, due to the changing 
nature of it.

Now, i'm sure every effort goes into making sure the packages are 
stable .. but what if there is a major security update to a package ... 
for example, zlib. The user has to update all their programs that use 
it with the current unstable ... being that unstable can be perfectly 
fine or completely broken at any given moment, this is risky .. 
especially for an end user that doesn't have much knowledge of linux 
... which appears to be Mepis's target audience.

Now, i haven't looked into this recently and perhaps Mepis does 
maintain and develop/release its own debs now ... But mepis is doing 
this, this will always be a problem.

2) There's nothing really 'special' that sets this distribution apart 
from say redhat, ubuntu, mandrake, suse, or any of the other big names. 
Aside from the handful of utilities written for it (which, has been 
stated can be written by anyone with some experience) there doesn't 
seem to be any 'real' development on the distro.

Are packages scrutinized? does the Mepis team build its own custom 
packages or just pull from the debian archives and find the ones that 
work best together? Do they patch packages and send patches up stream 
to package maintainers?

3) KDE. i down right hate kde. Its ugly and cumbersome .. in MY 
opinion. this isn't something worth debating since it is complete 
opinion. I just greatly prefer gnome. Its pretty and just seems to work 
and feel nicer. Yes, i could easily install gnome on it, but, since the 
system is tweaked for KDE why not just run a distro that has gnome as 
the default?

Mepis installs nicely, and has good hardware support out of the box. 
But, then again so does ubuntu, Fedora Core 3, and Redhat. I care about 
the licensing issue, but honestly that isn't a show stopper for me at 
all. I run MacOS X on my main desktop at work and at home (switched 
from many years of linux). While i believe strongly in Free, Open 
source Software I will sacrifice that (temporarily) to get something 
that does the job better.

In short, i just don't see anything "Special" about Mepis that many 
other distro's don't already offer, but i do see potential security and 
stability headaches that I don't currently have with other desktop 
linux distro's. And then, the default KDE setup not being to my 
personal liking is the finally straw to not recommending or using it 
(though minor compared to other reasons outlined above).

Mike.