ROTFL. "the power and freedom of Windows" -- that must be the funniest joke I've heard in weeks.

I have to agree with you on that one.

I've tried both, but preferred MEPIS because it did a better job at hardware detection.
MEPIS installation is much more user friendly which is also a bug plus.

Hey, the way I see it, if the guy wants to run as root and open his system up to anybody wanting to trash his system for him, that's his business. I think it's pretty stupid and just plain poor work habits, but it's his box.

its not about logging in as root and staying there, its about being able to log in and edit config files ina graphical environment, not everyone loves command line guys and if linux is EVER going to get taken seriously by the masses it has to make it so you never have to go into the command line, i however still would use it.

You can't open graphical applications with root privledges in Ubuntu??? News to me... sudo kate should work nicely...

Thats not what I'm saying, I'm saying new users wouldn't even know what sudo is, much less that now, to use any application in root privileges they have to goto run> type "sudo " and then the application name, which they may or may not know (such as kcontrol). I'm also not saying MEPIS is the end all be all of linux distributions, I'm just saying its more geared toward a new user than Ubuntu is

it is all about choice isnt' it? Choose your distro.. and support in
any way you can..

Personally.. I stumbled upon Mepis several months ago.. never
looked back..

My Choice.. Mepis.. even converted a crusty old UNIX guy
at work that swears by Redhat/Fedora..
Gave him a CD and said.. " hey.. take a look at this.. "

He REALLY hated admitting to me that he really liked Mepis.. :-)

Tried both, and MEPIS is the one I kept. I always liked KDE more than Gnome, although I use the lighter interfaces such as XFCE4 and Flux almost exclusively. It seems Mepis ran a whole lot better with the lighter GUIs; for some reason Ubuntu got all squirrelly with them (maybe that was my screwup). Never did like that sudo option; when I need to do root things, then I want to be in root. And with Mepis, EVERYTHING works ... even my cheap piece o'junk winmodem that came with the computer.

Mepis is still on my computer and I still use it, but after getting an external modem I opted for Kanotix and installed that as Debian Sid. That's my main system now. For me, Mepis was great to learn on and there's still plenty more to keep this experimenter busy, but it was time to move to El Sid.

It's definitely all about what works for you. I laugh when I read people saying that Mepis's hardware detection is subpar, as it detected my hardware much better than Ubuntu did. I don't think any Linux distribution's hardware detection is any worse or better than another's (well, provided you use the most up-to-date version of the distro)... it's just a matter of what's best at detecting your hardware.

Likewise, I can see advantages to the sudo system, but I prefer the temporary root log-in for two reasons:

1. Even though I'm generally a good typist, I do have the occasional typo, and when you're typing something rather long like sudo cp etc/X11/xorg.conf etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup, you don't want to mess up and have it do nothing just because you forgot a period or mixed up the upper and lower cases.

2. I don't always know where I'm going. It's nice to be able to click back a few folders, click forward a few folders, select a bunch of files at once that have nothing easy in common (they don't have the same extension, for example).

Command-line lovers can love the command line in Mepis, too. It's not like Mepis demands GUI use for root stuff--it just provides another option: never a bad thing.

i use slackware it has a cool name.

when my friends ask me what os im using its way more hip to say SLACK !!11!!!!1!!! at least for me anway

and MEPIS sounds like it could be worth trying

between the 2 my vote is for MEPIS

You know your post is quite offensive to us Africans on the forum. You may not like the name Ubuntu but there is no need to slag it off like that. I don't know how anybody can justify voting for a distro just from a name, particularly if they haven't used it before.

my post was not to be taken very serious. sorry i didn't mean to sound arrogant or offensize i respect all cultures of the world and linux users from africa must think that having a distro named ubuntu is awesome.

No problems if it was meant in jest.

"humanity towards others"
You just can't beat a name like that!