Ubuntu and Kubuntu vs. Mepis

[Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO]

Who in our group is actually using these distros?   I'm interested in
the ease of updating and stability after doing so compared to Mepis, HDD
installed Knoppix and regular Debian or any other Debian-based distro.

I've tried tons of LiveCDs, used Mepis quite a bit and never had success
with plain old Debian installing as a desktop.  I like Mepis out of the
box, though like any distro you find little bits that don't work or you
don't like.  Mepis is switching to the Ubuntu repositories with the next
release, in order to get more stable updates.

The point of this is, I still consider myself a Mepis user, but I'm
concerned about the quality of the Ubuntu repos if I stick with it.
Also, if I were to switch to Kubuntu, will I run into apt-pin problems
when I try to add software not included on the distro disks?  That has
been a problem on Mepis with the Debian unstable repos.  I tried the
64-bit Kubuntu last week and it looks great on my newish desktop PC, but
I also wonder how it will do on a PIII-500 with lots of ram.  An older
Mepis was OK on it after I turned off the flashing and bouncing
mouse-busy cursors.   Haven't had the guts to try a newer Mepis or
anything else on that PC.  I need a Linux with the games working for my
kids when they are over.