(spun off from another thread by me, to avoid going off on a tangent)

Is it? Please elaborate, if you can. I don't belong to Mepislovers and only bother looking at MEPIS.org when I'm going to download something, so I can't be sure whether MEPIS really suffers from limited public communication by Mr. Woodford and his group; but it seems to me that MEPIS doesn't make much noise, and tends to fly under the radar.

This doesn't mean that much, but I did notice last week that on Distrowatch's hit counter, MEPIS has "kinda sorta" dropped off the face of the earth--it was around #35 when it was once frequently in the top ten and even the top five (or close thereto). I already noticed at some point that, unlike other popular and/or newbie-friendly distros, MEPIS has no variants that I know of. (antiX doesn't count, being originally MEPIS-based but now independent.) This doesn't mean much either, except that if a user doesn't like some particular feature of MEPIS and doesn't know how to make a fork or a remastered variant, they're stuck--it's MEPIS or nothing.

I use SimplyMepis11 as a Xen host. It is just 'more' simplified Debian. I didn't expect much else and I'm happy.

Regards.

distrowatch shows Mepis at 48

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't know whether I misremembered (probably) or it's dropped even more, but that's pretty bad. It means not at all that MEPIS isn't good, but that nobody cares about MEPIS.

Maybe some missteps along the way (TA), switch to ubuntu and back to Debian and I see there is a charge of $18.00 to purchase. You can still download for free though.

I think the drop is is probably due to a combination of lack of activity (no one makes variants other than antiX) and KDE 4 being the only desktop manager. I'm probably not the only person in the Linux world who abhors KDE 4, and if MEPIS is going to use that, it could at least include an alternative desktop manager.

Distrowatch is not an accurate assessment of how popular a distro is. Being up high on distrowatch naturally pushes a distro higher. Just look at Mageia, it's a beast.
Mepis in my opinion is still one of the best distros out there. It is a kde orientated distro, but being based on Debian, it is possible to install other desktop environments, and the community repos provide updated versions of all the desktop environments. The people in the community are among the friendliest and they're not clueless either.
Distrowatch says the latest release of Mepius is 11.9. This is not entirely true, 1.9 is not a release, it is the alpha stage of Mepis 12: not even Beta, just Alpha. Mepis is based on Debian stable and The next release of Mepis won't be released until after the next release of Debian; Wheezy, is released as stable, which will be in approximately five months.
Being based on Debian stable, Mepis has a naturally slow activity cycle, so it doesn't get talked about often; there's nothing new to check out.
The people that use Mepis don't need to google it, because they already know about it, and know it's what they want.

As for this comment
It comes back to what i said about how that's just an Alpha. Mepis 12 won't truly be anything worth mentioning until Debian wheezy goes stable; until then, it's basically just Debian testing with a couple of changes.
Either way you mustn't have looked to hard, here's some links, instantly found once venturing into the dev section of the Mepis forums.

http://forum.mepiscommunity.org/view...p?f=77&t=33009
http://forum.mepiscommunity.org/view...p?f=77&t=33280
http://forum.mepiscommunity.org/view...p?f=77&t=33290
http://forum.mepiscommunity.org/view...p?f=77&t=33318
http://forum.mepiscommunity.org/view...p?f=77&t=33324
And finally the big one where everyone discusses it;
http://forum.mepiscommunity.org/view...p?f=77&t=33326


This is irrelevant but you sig, "It's my Linux and I'll @root if I want to."
That is a poor attitude to have. Running as root puts your machine at risk as i'm sure you've heard a million times before. You risk your machine being penetrated and then used as a host machine to deliver spam or malicious things to others. Many Windows users are always running as root, but because of there ignorance they don't even realize this potential issue. As a Unix/Unix-like user, you should be aware of this, and respect the issue with the appropriate action; by running as root only when absolutely necessary.

I agree, and that's why I continue to run it here!

I like KDE4, but I think it would be good idea for Mepis to include something else. There's been some talk over at their forums of doing something like that, but as I recall, the discussion was about including something light like IceWM or Fluxbox.

However, with the last two releases, I added Xfce; doing so was pretty much painless. Running Xfce in Mepis is quite like running the Xfce version of Debian Stable.

I also have Fluxbox in Mepis 11.

As for how this thread started out: Yes, lack of communication between Mepis' developer and the community has been an issue for quite some time, if not always. But the way I look at it, no distro is perfect, there's always something. Mr. Woodford consistently puts out excellent releases, and that's the most important thing, in my opinion.

That's okay, I don't mind discussing it. You couldn't have known that I've been using Linux daily for four and a half years, and sporadically for three before that; nevertheless, I regret that you and many other LQ users will, if I mention anything about using root, assume I don't know how wrong it is to use root casually and inappropriately. Or that I do know it but am being naughty. Please!--yes, I have indeed heard the lecture about root a million times before, and haven't used root inappropriately in years.
My signature is directed at distros and desktop managers that deliberately make it more difficult than it could be to login as root. Ubuntu, for instance (last I heard), and KDE Trinity. I like Trinity (using it now), but am annoyed at it for not allowing root logins by default. That's one of the first settings I change after installing it: I open /opt/trinity/kdmrc, find the line "AllowRootLogin=false," and change it to "true." It's the principle.

Not sure if you're aware but by using the main testing repository, you can run xfce 4.10.
Just letting you know because Debian runs 4.6.

Yeah, thanks... I'm okay with the earlier version for now, though. I'll check it out in a few months, I'm sure!