Swimming in the Pensieve

I happen to like a lot of different Linux distributions, but I have narrowed in-upon upon SimplyMEPIS as the one that I tend to come back to time and time again.

It’s Debian-based, which makes it a breeze to maintain and modify.

It’s KDE-centric, which gives me the time-savers, conveniences and power tools that I’m used to having in a Desktop Environment.

It follows that ‘Point-N-Click’ paradigm which makes it a distro that I can hand to the Linux-naive and be relatively certain that they can install it without problems.

It’s a 6 to 10 minute install, and an ‘apt-get update’, ‘apt-get install {application_name}’ away from anything I want or need.

I can get as Command-Line-Proggie-and-Kernel-Compiling-Geeky with it as I can with LFS or Gentoo.

I can switch to any other distro that I want to, any time I want to. I’m not locked-into anything at all (unlike windoze users).

My kids can install it all by themselves, if I want them to.

In short, I have complete control over, and complete freedom to do whatever I want to with, my computers.

There is much to like about what Warren has been doing with the MEPIS distro.

Traditionally–if you measure the formation of traditions in intervals of milliseconds–MEPIS has followed the KDE release numbering scheme for its own release numberings. However, the collaboration between the Warren and the folks at Canonical Limited (the progenitors of the Gnome-centric, Ubuntu distribution) has brought a new release numbering convention to MEPIS, along with many other good things in the transaction.

The next release of the Simply Mepis distribution will not be the usual fractional step-away from the former 3.4-3, landing at 3.5 (the current release of KDE). It will be 6.0, and the newest offering went from experimental, in March of this year, to RC1 on the 6th of this month.

SimplyMepis 6.0 Experimental on Ubuntu kernel - 2006.03
SimplyMEPIS 6.0 alpha1
SimplyMEPIS 6.0 alpha2
SimplyMEPIS 6.0 beta 1
SimplyMEPIS 6.0 beta 2
SimplyMepis 6.0 beta 3
SimplyMEPIS 6.0 beta 4
SimplyMEPIS 6.0 beta 5
SimplyMEPIS 6.0 RC1 - 2006.06.06

Having downloaded and installed 6.0-rc1 on Janette’s notebook computer, I can say that the quality of this rc exceeds the quality of most final releases of other software; and, it’s several orders of magnitude better than any version of windoze after the following version has already been released (read that as having every possible service pack, patch and fix applied).

Despite 6.0-rc1 having a very few, minor issues–all that I’ve read about are easily resolvable via simple work-arounds–SimplyMEPIS 6.0 is more than ready for prime-time right now.

It will be that much better in its final release incarnation, on the 27th of this month (barring some sort of major binary melt-down).