Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on April 27, 2007 04:49 AM
Too bad that Mepis now inherits Ubuntu's main weakness: most of the available software in Ubuntu is placed in the "universe" repository that isn't officially supported. "Universe" gets some community support but a lot of the archive gets no support at all -- not even security updates!
Debian, on the other hand, supports all the packages it makes available. Debian's new release, Etch, is a major improvement over Sarge. I'd say that Debian is now on par with Mepis and Ubuntu as far as ease-of-use is considered, plus Debian has better overall quality and official support for all the packages.
The only area where Debian falls short is that it doesn't install non-free drivers and illegal codecs by default. But Debian makes the drivers available in its "non-free" repository and the codecs can be downloaded by adding www.debian-multimedia.org to the APT sources.list.
Another possible weakness in the current Ubuntu-based Mepis is that Ubuntu Dapper is already getting old and the next Long Term Support version of Ubuntu is at least one year away yet. Debian, on the other hand, has a great KDE implementation and tracking the "testing" version of Debian gives you pretty up-to-date versions of all programs.
I really think that Mepis users lost some good things when Mepis switched from Debian to Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu-based Mepis
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 27, 2007 04:49 AMDebian, on the other hand, supports all the packages it makes available. Debian's new release, Etch, is a major improvement over Sarge. I'd say that Debian is now on par with Mepis and Ubuntu as far as ease-of-use is considered, plus Debian has better overall quality and official support for all the packages.
The only area where Debian falls short is that it doesn't install non-free drivers and illegal codecs by default. But Debian makes the drivers available in its "non-free" repository and the codecs can be downloaded by adding www.debian-multimedia.org to the APT sources.list.
Another possible weakness in the current Ubuntu-based Mepis is that Ubuntu Dapper is already getting old and the next Long Term Support version of Ubuntu is at least one year away yet. Debian, on the other hand, has a great KDE implementation and tracking the "testing" version of Debian gives you pretty up-to-date versions of all programs.
I really think that Mepis users lost some good things when Mepis switched from Debian to Ubuntu.
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