MEPIS has been on the top ten list at distrowatch for over three years. It usually is at #4, or 5 but it does go up and down in the ranks depending on new releases of MEPIS and other versions new releases of linux. Here is a partial excerpt from an article from distrowatch concerning the top ten linux versions.
Taken partially from distrowatch.....
And yet, it's hard to overlook the fact that both MEPIS Linux and PCLinuxOS have been climbing steadily in our Page Hit Ranking statistics over the last few years. In fact, MEPIS has been in the top ten list for more than three years, while PCLinuxOS has become such a hit in recent months that ever since entering its latest beta testing period, it is second only to Ubuntu in terms of number of visitors viewing the PCLinuxOS page. Granted, these statistics don't mean much, but in the absence of any reliable usage data, they are as good a way of judging a distribution's popularity as any.

And this partial excerpt....
If you only read popular computer magazines, you are unlikely to ever hear about any distribution beyond Red Hat/Fedora, Novell/openSUSE and Ubuntu families and that would be a real pity because there is so much more on offer out there.

And this...
And those who believe that PCLinuxOS and MEPIS are just re-mastered editions of Mandriva and Ubuntu without offering anything new, then I challenge you to travel to Houston and Morgantown, meet with Texstar and Warren Woodford, and tell them that, in their faces. Will you be able to do it? I doubt it. In fact, the two (more or less) one-man projects deserve credit for being able to deliver excellent products despite having a budget of almost zero dollars and despite having to compete with such powerful Linux giants as Red Hat, Novell or Canonical.

And last excerpt from distrowatch....
MEPIS Linux was first announced in 2003 by Warren Woodford and his company, MEPIS LLC. The idea was to turn the Debian unstable branch into a beginner-friendly distribution, complete with automatic hardware configuration, support for popular media formats, and latest software packages. MEPIS Linux pioneered the concept of an easily installable live CD - a user could simply boot the CD, investigate the content, and then install it to a hard disk with just a few mouse clicks.

In the following years the developers focused on providing reliable hardware support for all kinds of troublesome hardware, including software modems and wireless network cards. In 2006, largely due to the volatility of Debian's unstable branch, the base system of MEPIS Linux was switched from Debian to Ubuntu, which freed the development team from fixing the Debian bugs and to concentrate on usability enhancements. Originally MEPIS Linux consisted of two editions - a desktop-oriented SimplyMEPIS and a developer-oriented ProMEPIS, but the latter edition was later dropped. Currently, the project provides both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of SimplyMEPIS.

Here's the link to the whole article if any want to read it all.
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20070402

As I have said many times...."MEPIS is easy for new users"
This is proven by this post from a new user to MEPIS at MEPISlovers site.
The new user was looking for a way to start a script so I posted this reply....
This something I got from the wiki.

Starting a program automatically when KDE starts

To start a program or script automatically when a user logs in, add a link or script in ~/.kde/Autostart/ folder.

Make a link (using the file manager) by dragging an executable file to the folder and select "link here".

How to make a script:
Edit a new file in a text editor (KWrite, Kate, Kedit, etc)
Start the file with this line:
#!/bin/sh sudo mount //192.168.1.200/screamernet //mnt/sambashare -o username=uname password=password

Save the file.
Make it executable: use file manager: right-click on file and select Properties-> Permissions tab -> select is executable and click OK.
Or using konsole make it executable with:
chmod u+x filename

Try this and see if it will work for you. Others have made scripts using this info.

This is the answer that the new MEPIS user posted back.....


rebooting ...... and .......

WhooHooo...

I read that wiki yesterday, and had been unable to get it working, it wasn't until you posted it that i realised there was a space in the first line.

After taking that space out, and hit save, the system auto recognised that it was a shell script instead of a text file.

Thanks heaps mepnoob and Eadwine Rose

I only signed up about 15 minutes ago and my questions already been answered!!
End of post

"This is the type of support you can get for MEPIS. Something to keep in mind when you are choosing a new distro."


There is awesome support for MEPIS that rivals ANY forum that there is. You won't find help like this for windows and you'll be lucky to get help like this at some other linux forum. Just my opinion(shared by many intelligent users) but MEPIS is really a great distro and while you can get MEPIS help like this from me here at this forum or MEPISlovers
it's not the only place to get help with MEPIS related questions. Linuxquestions.org has a MEPIS forum. I post help there too.
Getting support for a new user can be a nightmare. I make it better when I can. So don't worry about getting help with MEPIS I will do all that I can to make your transition to MEPIS a good one. Good luck and welcome to MEPIS. It's the BEST!

One of the best places to get MEPIS is linuxtracker. Some MEPIS users, including myself, are seeding MEPIS torrents at linuxtracker. Grab it there as the md5sums are accurate.

I responded to the distrowatch comments on my blog: http://linux-blog.org/index.php?/arc...PCLinuxOS.html

TKS that was an awesome blog. Well written. I've got o93 big daddy and i am waiting to try the PClinuxOS final when it comes out. MEPIS is the one i use most but I have played with PClinuxOPS lately too. They're both (MEPIS and PClinuxOS) similar in a lot of ways. If I wasn't so in to MEPIS I would be using PClinuxOS next. It's that good. If MEPIS wasn't here I would be using PClinuxOS. It's great distro too.