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There are many warriors in the battle for reigning king of the Linux desktop, and if you need proof, Distrowatch.com is proof positive that almost everyone is in the game. The top ten seem to be reserved for the best of the best, and the distro we're looking at today is one of them: MEPIS Linux. Currently they are holding steady at #5 on the Distrowatch page hit ranking chart, and are in the company of giants such as Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, and SUSE Linux. This means they must have something to offer us in terms of usability and stability on the desktop, right? Well, we're here to find out. Read on for the experience I had running this highly regarded distribution...
The only problem I've had with a USB key on Mepis is that when I right click on the icon (which does appear automatically on the Desktop on my machine) and choose "Safely Remove" the icon flickers but doesn't disappear. This does make it somewhat difficult to tell when the keyring is ready to be pulled out. I also had a bit of a job getting DVD's to playback, despite all the correct files being in place. This was easy enough to fix in the end by rm-ing the old /dev/dvd and making the new one point to the correct drive but for a new user a message about the disk not being in the drive when it patently is, is not helpful and jumping straight to the command line to remove a device file and replace it would be impossible.
The way Mepis doesn't mount other partitions is annoying. KwikDisk is loaded at boot and if I open it and click on each partition in turn it mounts them (and by default opens each one in it's own Konqueror window, which is all well and good on a system with one or two extra partitions, but one of my boxes has two drives with about 6 partitions on each). This ought not to be. On a live CD fair enough, but not on an installed system. I tried editing fstab but the edits didn't hold and the file was returned to it's default state on the next boot. Xorg.conf is also horribly complex with loads of sections in place for devices which aren't present on the system.
After installing the updates from Mepis the Ethernet card goes into "do not start at boot" mode which is very annoying and somewhat perplexing and means setting it back using the Mepis Control Center. Again, why? Would a new user necessarily know what Eth0 is or that it needs starting and needs to be told to "start at boot" options for which are on two separate tabs in the Network section of the Control Center. (The Mepis Control Center is pretty easy to sus out even if it is somewhat primitive in appearance).
Mepis doesn't pick up other ditros except Windows when creating a bootloader configuration and adding simple sections to menu.lst after installation doesn't seem to work as it would on Ubuntu or Debian.
Most of this I presume is because Mepis installs from a live CD, so the disk is more or less copied byte for byte to the hard drive, including all the configurations that are appropriate for a live CD.
I have had some terrible problems with Mepis, screen resolutions and nvidia drivers, having had some installations reduced to having no workable X after running dpkg-reconfigure (which I've been using for a couple of years now on all the other Debian based distros with 100% success). I've had similar problems on just about every distro bar one. Ubuntu.
I agree the fishtank on the taskbar is a little silly and the group of mini icons mentioned I also tend to remove straight away. Though the fishtank is silly it does inject a little humour into proceedings giving the desktop a fun feel. I realise this is anathema to a lot of seasoned users but remember new users are coming from an environment where a stupid animated dog runs around while Windows fails to find files you know for absolute sure are on the hard drive. People need to be broken in slowly. Give them animation and a search function that works. Then they learn they can remove the silly animation.
On every other distro I have to manually add the nvidia drivers and manually add pretty much all the plugins and media players (mplayer in particular). Mepis has pretty much all this installed with the exception of the licensed codecs. Then again, I've yet to see a distro that had everything out of the box and I include in that an acceptable default desktop. Suse 10 is the closest to this with it's default theme but then goes and spoils everything by shipping it with crippled media players and leaving find-utils out.
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Most of this I presume is because Mepis installs from a live CD, so the disk is more or less copied byte for byte to the hard drive, including all the configurations that are appropriate for a live CD.
I have had some terrible problems with Mepis, screen resolutions and nvidia drivers, having had some installations reduced to having no workable X after running dpkg-reconfigure (which I've been using for a couple of years now on all the other Debian based distros with 100% success). I've had similar problems on just about every distro bar one. Ubuntu. I agree the fishtank on the taskbar is a little silly and the group of mini icons mentioned I also tend to remove straight away. Though the fishtank is silly it does inject a little humour into proceedings giving the desktop a fun feel. I realise this is anathema to a lot of seasoned users but remember new users are coming from an environment where a stupid animated dog runs around while Windows fails to find files you know for absolute sure are on the hard drive. People need to be broken in slowly. Give them animation and a search function that works. Then they learn they can remove the silly animation.
On every other distro I have to manually add the nvidia drivers and manually add pretty much all the plugins and media players (mplayer in particular). Mepis has pretty much all this installed with the exception of the licensed codecs. Then again, I've yet to see a distro that had everything out of the box and I include in that an acceptable default desktop. Suse 10 is the closest to this with it's default theme but then goes and spoils everything by shipping it with crippled media players and leaving find-utils out.
Swings and roundabouts.