Hi,
It's been months since I last used MEPIS 3.3, and I have been a solid Ubuntu user ever since.
These are a few points I can remember between my experiences with MEPIS and Ubuntu:
1. GNOME looks more professional, altho' it lacks many of the Right-Click options and functions of KDE, but still, I can get most work done with the former, so I got stuck to Ubuntu.
2. Ubuntu detected my hardware more quickly and accurately than MEPIS. Altho' Ubuntu does not come with the official nVidia driver, it could at least set up a viewable screen using the "nv" driver. MEPIS did not do that in all the versions I used from 2004.x.
3. MEPIS is definitely more productive upfront, since Flash, Java, mplayer plugins etc. were already packaged into the system out of the box.
HOWEVER, many other things would NOT work no matter what I downloaded, or would take tons of searching and hunting before it worked. eg. SCIM and/or UTF-8 interface never did work in MEPIS, but with Ubuntu, it was a simple install-from-Synaptic and now I have tens of languages I can input into my OpenOffice.org.
4. MEPIS icons were scattered all over the place upon installation, and when I showed my non-Linux friends the desktop with the MEPIS liveCD, they said, "Yucks!"
With Ubuntu, they said, "Wow, this desktop looks cool... like a Mac!"
5. Ubuntu is FAST, and with the i686 kernel installed, things work much more speedily than MEPIS. The bootup, shutdown etc. in Ubuntu all works faster than in MEPIS.
Talking about startup services, I only hope that soon, BOTH Ubuntu and MEPIS can have the same installation tools, bootup splash screen and setup tools like the ones you find for Fedora Core (Ananconda), SUSE (YaST) and Mandriva (Mandrake Control Center).
Aren't these tools supposed to be open-source? If so, isn't it simply a matter of taking them and integrating them into Ubuntu Breezy?
6. This one may be off-topic: AUTOPACKAGE works with Ubuntu!! Now, honestly I have yet to install autopackages in MEPIS, but who really cares about whether is it RPM or DEB based distros when you can simply find an autopackage nowadays?
Autopackage is the most significant software for me in Linux, because I never had great success using the commandline to install programs, and for so long, I had to download different RPMs and DEBs of the SAME program, simply because I was installing the same program on different distros.
Now, I hated it, coz I was using dialup.
OK, that's it for now! If time permits, I will come back to this thread and add the other experiences I have that I don't have the time to go into now.
Thanks!
Regards,
Rykel
Singapore
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