When it comes to spped and stability which one of those come on top. I heard Ubuntu is good but has lots of bugs. And I heard the same for Mepis. So really out of the two,which is the better distro and why?

Thanks

I've been using ubuntu since Warthog was first released. I love it. I'm running Hedgehog now and it's even better. As for bugs, I think this best explains the bugs in Hoary.

Give them both try and then make your own mind up. Ubuntu has a live cd version and Mepis is a Live CD, get hold of some copies.

They are both Debian based distros. I tried Mepis and, for a pre-packaged and IMHO somewhat bloated distro, I was farily impressed with it's hardware detection and quick easy install.

I gave Ubuntu a try but ran into problems with hardware detection on my laptop but I understand it's also a very good distro.

Mepis is geared around KDE, Ubuntu is geared around Gnome. Of course you can always add whatever window manager you please after install.

I agee with the idea of giving them both a try. Other than the meager cost of a couple CD-Rs and a little time, what do you have to lose? I went through a LOT of different distros before I finally settled in with Gentoo.

Everyone has their own needs and personality. Check out a few distros until you find one you are comfortable with. After all, once you get past the shiny paint and pin-stripes, it's all Linux under the hood.

Bugs? What Bugs? I've been using Ubuntu Warty for several months and have not had a single problem with it. As for speed and stability, KDE has neither of those so go with Ubuntu. I used to be a hard-line KDE user, but after using GNOME 2.8 for a while I was really impressed.

<flamebait>
I don't want to start a holy war with all you K-Heads out there, but GNOME is better. Just admit it
</flamebait>

Well, it is flamebait. People have to choose their own desktop environment not to be told that one is better than the other because its personal preference. Both are good DEs and Ubuntu now has a KDE only version called Kubuntu.

Well, I'm not going to enter into the flame above...but after trying both, I prefer Ubuntu. It's really up to you tho. Try both and see where your preference lies.

Oh, I agree. The humor for me is that not too long ago I was just as adamantly pro KDE

No offense intended

On purely technical merits, it is hard to rank one above the other.

What I have found to be the real advantage of Ubuntu over Mepis is the documentation. Mepis is vary sparsely documented, and its offical websites are not well organized, and many sections are out of date. This is not really surprising considering the Mepis project is a one man deal. There is only so much Warren has time for. The MepisLovers site (assuming it comes back online) seems to be Mepis's best shot at thoroughly organized documentation.

Ubuntu on the other hand has darn near everything already. FAQ's, HOW-TO's, security notices, a wiki, official forums that are actually used, an official IRC channel, mailing lists, and that's just the stuff on their site or linked from their site. Heck, we even have an Ubuntu LQ forum.

I suggest you try kubuntu (kde 3.4)...You may change your mind about kde being slow and unstable. It actually has made me switch from gnome to kde.

I run SimplyMepis 2004 2.6.7, and I'm very satisfied. Install only took 20 minutes or so, it was easy from there to configure my internet connection and email, I was online just a few minutes later with Mozilla (current version ships with Firebird instead). The few questions I had were quickly answered on the Mepis forums (and this one also), so documentation really isn't an issue to me. CD only costs $10 and delivery was very fast, just a few days.
I haven't tried Ubuntu yet, but hope to soon, not because I'm dissatisfied in any way with Mepis, but merely as curiosity, especially about Gnome, which I haven't tried in years, since SuSE 7.1 (at the time it didn't work as well as KDE for me).

I'm a relative noob myself, and have only tried Slack 10.1, Mepis 3.3 and Kubuntu. Here's my personal experience with Kubuntu and Mepis:
I ran Mepis for about a month and it worked quite well. I agree that it is a bloated distro, though. Who needs 5 different gui text editors installed by default? One good thing about Mepis is that it has many "non-free" items pre-configured out of the box, such as flash, some windows media codecs, etc. You have to get these yourself in K/Ubuntu, but this is only a minor inconvenience, especially since apt-get is so easy. I decided to switch to Kubuntu for a couple of reasons. First of all, Mepis apparently has trouble with USB mass storage devices, and I have a flash drive and an external USB HDD that I use a lot. You can get it to work by manually editing fstab, but I would rather have a working hotplug system. Also, Kubuntu was much less bloated, only taking up 1.7GB with a full install. I had fewer problems overall with Kubuntu, and its ACPI system works better for my laptop than Mepis's did. In terms of speed, I think Kubuntu wins because of its non-bloatedness. Mepis runs many services on boot that many desktop users will never use, such as web, mail and Samba servers. Mepis has almost everything set up out-of-the-box, but this also means that it will have many, many things you don't need at all. Also, I think that KDE 3.4 (on Kubuntu) is slightly faster. Neither one of them has had any issues with stability. Overall, Kubuntu has been a cleaner, better-working distro for me. All that said, you should definitely try the livecd versions of both before you decide. See which one works best with your hardware.

Best of luck,

--C

I'm impressed with both. However, I feel one will stick with one that works best OVERALL with their hardware. Mepis worked with my wireless pci card while ubuntu 4.10 did not. Now ubuntu 5.04 also detects and works great with my wireless pci card. In Mepis I have to append doscisi to the kernel to get my external firewire drives detected. In ubuntu it just works. Biggest thing I'm working on (ok reading forums basically and testing) is getting mplayer or totem integrated so places like http://apple.com/trailers just works.

Mepis will not be beat for a live cd if your trying to use it in a kiosk enviroment as Ubuntu will never include mp3, flash, java on the live cd. Only way would be if ubuntu use unionfs and allowed it to be burned (appended) on the live cd or something like that. Mepis is easier to get it and running in 15 to 20 minutes. Ubuntu takes a couple of hours or more.

On Mepis I went for maybe 2 months or more with nvidia 3D accererlation. It was working before that but 2.6.10 kernel + nvidia had an issue. On ubuntu 5.04 it just worked. Now supposedly it'll work in Mepis too but am playing with ubuntu quite a bit and like it.

I am downloading Kubuntu 5.04 as I speak so I can't comment on it yet. I have run Mepis and Fedora Core two, and debian sarge. I started out with Fedora on the suggestion from a freind of mine who said that at the time he felt that it was the best beginner distro. I liked it, but RPM package management sucks. He then encouraged me to get my feet wet in debian, so I tried SimplyMEPIS 2004. I really liked it, although I missed the polished and complete look of Fedora. I had fallen for apt-get when I installed apt for rpm on Fedora. I ran that for a while, and then after talking to him decided to try Debian Sarge. I got the first disk, thinking that after installing the base system I would apt-get everything I wanted. I found that the install was pretty tough, and I didn't know what all the cryptic questions were talking about. Most of this was probably my fault, as I was (And still am) a relative noob. I got the base system installed, ran pppoeconf and got my DSL working, and then got KDE up and running. I had tried Gnome with Fedora, and found I disliked the non navigating windows, I wanted to be able to go back to the last directory in the same window, not have to go back to a different one. I used it for a while, but I just didn't get into it, so I installed Pro MEPIS, and then SimplyMEPIS 3.3. Although these were both drastic improvements over the older MEPIS, I still found them to be a little rough compared to the screenshots I had seen of SuSe and other bigger distros. I had heard that Ubuntu and Xandros were really good looking, but I didn't want gnome, and I didn't want Xandros' windows imitation, I wanted Linux. I found out about Kubuntu while checking out distrowatch, and hopefully I enjoy it.

So if you were using apt-get on Fedora what sucks abut rpm package management because apt-get on Fedora works more or less the same as on Debian. Also the issue about "new windows" in gnome (spatial nautilus) can be turned off.