DistroWatch Weekly Comments

Hey Mister Lag, yes I read the latest DistroWatch Weekly and saw the comment. I'm a BIG FAN of Mepis but Ladislav is commenting from the perspective of all the different Linux distros that he's seen come (and go).

Mepis actually was on the rise and it was exciting when it surpassed MANDRAKE (before tha name change) and stuck! But it has been holding its own at #4 for quite some time. Not bad for a distro with so few developers!

As for me, I was a little disheartened by the comment also, and I hope that it will be so much "wind" that will be shown to be incorrect in a handful of months. The article on comparing Live CDs was interesting too, but the author did not include Mepis as one of the tests

Again, there are a lot of distros and I think that Warren will be needing help from more people (and more money). It looks like that might happen soon, based on the latest post from Warren to get a survey of what we want him to do. Did you fill it out?

Jon

"long development cycles, too many bugs"

It seems that things are moving along faster now that Warren is using the Ubuntu repositories.

"long development cycles, too many bugs"

The only problem with the above quotation (from TFA) is that many of the "too many bugs" are on the Ubuntu side. I'm not suggesting that Mepis itself is bug-free, but I think Warren has been trying to patch Mepis-specific bugs as fast as he, and his developers, can do so.

Debian, and Debian-derived distributions used to follow the idea that "We will release no operating system before its time...". This idea of regular, timely releases is relatively new to Debian-esc distros. Red Hat and the other commercial Big Guys have been trying to maintain this idea for some time; and it's a good goal.

However Warren, and other independent developers have a not-so-glamorous position: not in-front-of nor behind the cart or horse, but rather between the cart and horse: Gotta run fast enough to keep up with new changes, and keep going fast enough not to get run over by the discovered bugs!

Oh, and let's not forget how long it takes The Redmondistas to "officially patch" their OS

Jon

I thought the Distrowatch comments were pretty weird because one of the distros it favored was PCLinuxOS, which has just made it to 0.93a, after holding on 0.92 for how long? I mean what kind of a development cycle is that?

I've tested that one out, thought the graphics and organization were great, but as I started using it, 0.92 seemed to be missing little bits and pieces, including simple matters like the way fonts displayed in various apps (important in my work), something which is not a problem in Mepis. Off the hard drive it went. Perhaps the next tiny incremental step to 0.93a is ready for prime time, but it won't make it on looks alone.

I do agree with their observation that a one-man distro is a problem over the long haul, but I'm very satisfied with 6.0, and it will remain on my hard drive. I just finished networking the Mepis Linux computer with an XP machine and two 98 machines, with plans to make it my main work PC over the next few months, primarily because I'm worried about WGA glitches interrupting the work flow on my XP hard drive.

And if Warren decides he wants to grow his hair long, sit in a tree and play the flute rather than laboring over a hot hard drive all day, I'm not too worried. Even it means that eventually I have to switch to something else, the Linux-first plan will remain on track. And I couldn't have begun it without Warren and Mepis and an old serviceable PC that someone was going to throw away because the mouse was "broken."

I love mepis to bits never have I come across a distro like it I would be realy sad to see it go. I have used lots of distros such as

suse kubuntu ubuntu fedora deinbolic mandraver (and mandrake) PClinuxOS xandros knoppix DSL ark - and a few live distros

O and there are others too, dont for get most of which I used for some time and seeing and using most of them if a short wile. mepis is the one that stands out for me. I think it is sad to hear it is a one man band, but i am sure that another guy can help warren and make that not so, and inprove mepis alot

it is about personal preference though which distro you like

I watched mepis clime 4 place [distro watch] kind of next to ubuntu and with out mepis giving free CD's or having lots of money!. some thing which we have to rember. I hope in the next mepis we can gain more and knock people that say it is a ship in the night. I belive that mepis should use inventiveness at all time to clime it to the top

why is it that most distros are now using gnome. I think mepis sould stay kde for along time. and get the people that need this destop

good luck!

Mepis has been on the cover of the Lunix Format twice in five months 3.4.3 and 6.0, and now even in a complete special edition with three CD's, so I don't think this is no "Burn Out" case... No, I think some comment like this makes newbies curious, and will try it anyway. Or in Irish: Tiocfaidh ár lá (= Our day will come) harhar... And I do rather believe the other comments which are to be read in other links via Distrowatch!

Rudi

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Compaq N1050v, Pentium 4 1.8 GHz, 1024Mb Ram, Mepis 6.0.
Shuttle SN41G2, AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 512Mb RAM Mepis 6.0.
Linuxcounter user reg # 417292 Tiocfaidh ár lá
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OK, I'm getting irked! I guess I'll have to wander down to the bookstore and see if they have this "Special Edition" of Linux Format. I haven't been down there for a few days. The last time was to see if the might have finally received the October Linux Pro Magazine with Mepis on DVD. The one store I went to had AUGUST and SEPTEMBER (and here it is Oct. 10th). I know their UK-based magazines (and I have started a subscription to both of them), and I'm here in the 'States. But this is gettin' infuriating!

Who knows, maybe when I walk into the store they'll have BOTH magazines

Thanks for the "heads up" ruud!

Jon

B.T.W. Is Warren having any health-problem?!
If so, Warren get well soon!
And could someone links this article to this string or copy it, I do not seem to be able to find it...
Ruud
=====
Compaq N1050v, Pentium 4 1.8 GHz, 1024Mb Ram, Mepis 6.0.
Shuttle SN41G2, AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 512Mb RAM Mepis 6.0.
Linuxuserreg # 417292 Tiocfaidh ár lá
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Hi Ruud
Here's the link to the distrowatch article. I think the part about mepis starts abot the 20 ish comment range mate.

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20060828&mode=1

Cheers
Jacko

World Community Grid. Join the World Wide Ownage team

I recently expressed some frustration with MEPIS possibly not meeting my requirements and my intention to test default intalls of some other distros. I'd like to temper that by saying that in the past two years I've tested quite a number of distros and consider MEPIS one of the very best. Even if it turns out not to be the best for ME, I'd hate to see the magic stop! And I have felt for a long time that Warren is a real hero to have kept up so much hard work under what must often be discouraging circumstances, so I hope he knows how much his effort is appreciated. The same goes for the regular helping crew in this forum, incidently, particular Jon Du Quense--- while MEPIS is said to have a small development community, I believe the size of its user community (to judge from the number of downloads tracked by distrowatch) is due both to the quality and ease of install/use of MEPIS itself, and to the comparative ease of obtaining good answers at the forum here.

I have some comments about the Distrowatch discussion: some have raised the question of whether it is really a good idea to have so many different distros. I think there are pros and cons; one "pro" consideration which has not been mentioned are that even if a distro never makes it past 0.8 or 1.5 before becoming defunct, someone learned a lot in taking it that far and might become a stronger open-source programmer and contributer to other distros as a result. (To mention just one point: a developer who has rolled his own distro will probably be more cautious in making design choices which introduce many "exotic" dependencies.) I have no idea if that is really happening but it seems a reasonable expectation to me.

Much more generally, I would say that Microsoft's near monopoly has had the beneficial effect of imposing some standardization (think how chaotic things would be if there were NO standards which de facto everyone must follow), while competition from open-source (esp. linux community) has had the equally beneficial effect of preventing some of the worst of Microsoft's products from becoming unavoidable (e.g. by providing LAMP, which seems to have become a de facto standard). And free or low-cost resources (e.g. development tools) plus competition WITHIN the linux community is part of what keeps good ideas bubbling up here. And to be fair to the Evil Giant, Microsoft has certainly played a huge role in making PCs so ubiquitious that hardware prices have fallen so low that most citizens in Western countries can afford to buy the things on which they might choose to install MEPIS in the first place.

In some other threads, I have recently been expressing some frustration regarding that old bugaboo, package management. One important point here is that not even Microsoft seems to have really mastered the art even for its own inhouse products (it seems that the package management problem is just plain HARD), so comparing resources, it is impressive that the linux community does as well as it does, even though the split between Debian type and Red Hat type distros (for example) can be a real headache. One change I'd like to see in how the popular linux distros do package management is to separate patch function (as in bug fixes of "stable" version) from update function (as in adding new features). Presently, it is too hard for someone like me to obtain and patch critical security flaws without trying to install the latest version (which incorporates bug fixes but also adds new features and new dependencies). As far as I can tell, many or most the popular distros attempt to make the second function easy for newbies, but not the first, and that is a real problem, in my opinion. Another improvement I'd like to see is cryptographic features (like autochecking GPG signatures of packages before downloading them) enabled "out of the box". Actually, this might be as simple as providing clear instructions for using tools which are already in place; I have not been able to figure out how to use packages like debian-keyring, which suggests (at least to me) that presently this critical feature is too hard for the average citizen who might wish to switch to linux. I feel that these features should be required, not optional.

I also wish to express best wishes to Warren regarding rumored health problems.

feheeszeno

Good point feheeszeno. One nice thing about open-source development is that it's all out there. We all can see the success and failure of various "new widgets". Even the "failures" are not entire failures because of what you stated: We learn more from what someone else has tried.

Just because square corners don't work on a blue widget, it might work if we have rounded corners on a ping widget. And eventually we will learn so much about widgets that an unimagined new functionality will develop!

Jon

And I specifically hope that developers of some of the more interesting forensics/rescue mini distros will start working with MEPIS and DSL to make those tools available in bootable pen drives with a fairly snappy interface, such as the window manager and so on used by DSL. (None of the other mini distros are much fun to use because the video quality is so poor.)

Not long ago I heard that KDE was displacing Gnome. Now I hear that Gnome is displacing KDE. Not to start up that perennial flamefest again, but surely the intense competition between these two projects is improving both products.

feheeszeno