Mepis 11 comes on a live DVD which includes a guide you can view with your browser. Installation is done once the live system is running, using what is probably the best installer there is.

In reviewing Mepis 8.5, I said it would run in 256MB. That is no longer true: KDE must have grown. As well as the usual KDE things, you get LibreOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, Firefox, Amorak, and VLC. The two latter have all the codecs pre-installed. Everything I tested worked.

The documentation is excellent. As a test, I followed the instructions for installing a new desktop and removing KDE. I didn't understand all of the commands I entered, but they worked perfectly to give me an Xfce system. So often alternative GUIs are inferior (Xfce in Fedora, Gnome in OpenSuse) but everything still worked.

Simply Mepis is based off of Debian stable, and is a true Debian based distro, unlike some other distros, most notably, Ubuntu. It focuses on ease of use, and stability, and does a damn good job. It is very focused on Kde, and although i prefer kde, i think it's still important to acknowledge that Mepis does not have a gnome edition ect. Gnome and other desktop environments can be installed with apt, but many people may find the noninclusive a put off. (gnome used to be equally supported, but people whom liked gnome weren't drawn to Mepis, so it got dropped). Simply Mepis is very stable, and it gets this feature from Debian stable. With this pro, comes the sacrifice of having slightly outdated packages, if this becomes a problem (such as older kernel not supporting newer hardware) this can be overcome, by using Debian backports, which although will reduce your stableness, you won't be dropping all the way down to say Debian Testing/sid.
I highly recommend Simply Mepis, and can honestly say that it is perhaps my third favorite distro; only behind Slackware and Debian.