I think that the prior view on Mepis 2003.10 was accurate and characterized it well. I am writing this review from a Mepis desktop. The only drawback to this software, which might be of concern to more advanced Debian users is that they have rewritten the kernel in such a way that certain major Debian commands, such as "apt-get dist-upgrade" don't work, because doing such upgrades messes up their system. One does not have this kind of problem with Knoppix.

But the Mepis hardware recognition and setup is the best I've seen on any distro yet, period. One the three systems that I installed Mepis, installation was far smoother than Knoppix.

Mepis is easily one of the best Linux distributions I've ever used. Others included Red Hat 7, 9, and Fedora, along with Mandrake 9 and 10.

It takes the stability of a Debian Linux setup and wraps it into an effortless installation. The base content for a basic installation, including Mozilla, OpenOffice, and other essentials, is found on the first CD. The second CD contains supplemental packages you can install optionally. CD1 also doubles as a convenient LiveCD that you can try without having to commit to installing it. Using KPackage, it is a breeze to download and setup additional components. Just point, click, and install. It doesn't get any easier than that. Not wanting to deal with the technical underpinnings of Linux, I'm pleased that Mepis makes the Debian experience available in a form that's as easy to install and setup as Fedora or Mandrake. The automatic hardware detection, in my opinion, rivals that of even the venerable Mandrake. This is definitely a Linux distribution that "just works." Unlike Mandrake, it delivers constantly smooth and fast performance.

Criticism would mainly be that ATI's OpenGL support for my Radeon 9700 Pro is incompatible with Mepis. To my knowledge, there is no account of anyone ever getting it to work. However, this is certainly more the fault of ATI's insistance of offering only one closed-source package to do the job rather than any failing of Mepis. This is, although, one thing Fedora and Mandrake have over Mepis. Mepis also, oddly, only sems to ship with vi as the built-in text editor. Having nano or emacs built in would have been nice (again, easily addressed through KPackage). Although it was resolved by removing it in the latest version, support for Flash is oddly broken for Mozilla, Konqueror, and other browsers. Of course, what's Flash used for today other than providing obnoxious ads?

For me, Mepis is a great compromise between Fedora and Mandrake. It has the basic packages and speed of Fedora, yet has no crippled NTFS or MP3 support. It has the hardware detection, partition detection, and ease-of-use like Mandrake, but is uncluttered, fast, and features Debian's rock-solid stability. All-in-all, it's just a fantastic Linux distribution and I highly recommend it primarily for fans of Fedora or Mandrake who want to give a Debian installation a guide, but don't want to jump through technical hurdles to get there.

9/10

I am pretty much brand new to Linux. I've learned a few thigns here and there since my first exposure to it, but now that I've found Mepis I'm ready to settle down on it. It's very user friendly. I've tried several distros including Red Hat 9 and Mandrake 9.2, and Mepis trumps them all easily.

For me, a true newbie, it's got something very important for getting people to stick with Linux -- it just works. You put the CD in and it runs off of it. If you fancy it, you're only a few clicks away from installing it. Thanks to it's Debian nature, you've got access to thousands upon thousands of packages to very easily download and install.

I'm not getting too technical here for a reason -- I don't know the technics of it all. But I know that even as a beginner, I've got Mepis doing everything I want it to, something I've been unable to achieve with any other distro. I recommend this to any newbie.

I really love MEPIS for the ease of use but I can only get online at 14.4kbs with linuxant.com free modem driver because it wont see my M$ MN-510 adapter or modem. I cant get my Aureal 8810 sound card to work either. Other than that the setup is better than any I have used before (SUSE, Red Hat, Mandrake). I love the ammount of bundled software in it so I dont have to dowload it on a slow conection. I would recommend this to NEWBIES all over as well as seasoned Linux Users.