Ubuntu and Kubuntu vs. Mepis

[Jason D. Clinton]

On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 13:18 -0500, Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO
wrote:

> 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 run Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my laptop and love it for it's
"no-brainer-ness". Everything just works. But I run Debian Unstable on
my desktop to track development and do development myself. It's more
work to keep it up and running but I have access to the huge amount of
software in Debian at the latest version. I use the Gnome 2.14 desktop
on both.


> 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.


Probably more "current" releases instead of "stable". Debian Stable is
solid as a rock. But their next release isn't until December of this
year.


> 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.


Ubuntu's repos are formidable because they are largely based on
Debian's. In additional, there's a laudable backport effort that works
to bring newer software to older Ubuntu releases. The quality is great.
Adding software from outside the distro is fine as long as it comes from
the right Debian release.

As far as resources are concerned, there won't be any difference between
distros. You should use Gnome 2.14 if you're that worried about it.
Gnome just went through a gang-busters optimization release cycle where
they re-engineered a lot of their internal data structures for speed and
efficiency.

-- 
Jason D. Clinton <me at jasonclinton.com>
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