desktoplinux.com — MEPIS Linux founder Warren Woodford began, a year ago, to migrate MEPIS from Debian to Ubuntu packages, and in July achieved the first Ubuntu-based simplyMEPIS release. In light of the recently announced Linspire/Ubuntu collaboration, DesktopLinux.com asked Woodford to clarify the MEPIS/Ubuntu relationship. His response was quite interesting.
Feb 17, 2007 View in Crawl 4
sanguinemoonFeb 17, 2007
The other day, I just switched from Ubuntu to Mepis for both technical (there are a couple things that I discovered that I consider really, really bad )and personal reasons (and the f**king Ubuntu fanboys). The feel of Mepis is completely different, and despite using Ubuntu repo's feels much closer to the Debian roots. The KDE is nicer than Ubuntu's somehow, even though it pulls from Ubuntu Dapper's repos. This might be simply because in a misguided attempt to like Gnome, I down loaded Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu; although that shouldn't have made a difference. One specific issue with the KDE in Ubuntu is that oddly enough, many of the SVG icon sets were incomplete. I after getting KDE all pretty and how I like it, I decided to install XFCE in Mempis. XFCE in Ubuntu was always all Gnomeifed. I would check "Allow XFCE to manage the desktop" in Ubuntu and the next reboot, XFCE was no longer managing the desktop, but Gnome was even without me launching Nautilus. In Mepis, there is a proper su! :))) In earlier versions of Ubuntu, there was sudo instead of su. That was ok, since at least there was seperate password for the normal user and the superuser. Now the normal and admin password are the same in Ubuntu. That annoyed the hell out of me. This is usually explained that first user can switch to sudo by default. Even so, I much prefer to have su and a separate admin and normal user password.Anyway, if you're a Ubuntu user and would like a change, you should give Mepis a shot. I considered OpenSUSE at first, since I used to use SUSE 9.1 and than 9.2, but thought better of it because of a certain deal. I even thought of just using regular Debian, but I didn't want or need something that big. So Mepis seem like a good choice for me to try.