Outrageously good. The livecd boots faster than most hdd installs. System booted, installed to hdd, and rebooted to hard drive install in less time than the Fedora livecd required just to get to a login prompt.

Nowadays, everyone uses Ubuntu, most people have used Fedora, and many folks have tried openSUSE. SimplyMEPIS ... not so many. That's a shame, because this relatively obscure Debian-based desktop distribution from Morgantown, WV, is an outstanding desktop operating system. With SimplyMEPIS 8 at beta 5 and closing in on release, I tested the distribution and found it to be a keeper.

I've tried several versions of the SimplyMEPIS but never really got hooked on the visual appearance leaving me wondering what beginners find so appealing in SimplyMEPIS. With the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.5.01 and addition of KDE 4.3.4 I decided this was the perfect time to give it a try and see what all the fuss is about.

Lets take a closer look at how intuitive the SimplyMEPIS 8.0.10 Live CD really is for a Windows user. I’ve introduced SimplyMEPIS to a lifelong Windows user and documented the “cans” and “can nots” of his first 2 hours on this Linux distribution.

It’s funny that my first encounter with SimplyMepis came as sort of an accident. I have been reading Preacherpen’s articles about Mepis and had actually downloaded the new SimplyMepis 8. Since I already had the CD of Mepis 8, I decided to see what it would do on the old laptop.

MEPIS LLC has released SimplyMEPIS 8.0.06, an update to the community edition of MEPIS 8.0. The updated components on the SimplyMEPIS ISOs include recent updates from the Debian Lenny pool and also Linux kernel 2.6.27.21, Firefox 3.0.9, jbidwatcher 2.0.1, and gutenprint 5.2.3.

Back in March we had compared the performance of Ubuntu and Fedora as we tested Ubuntu 6.10 and Fedora 6 along with development versions of Ubuntu 7.04 and Fedora 7. During those benchmarks, Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 5 had a slight lead over Fedora but the race was extremely close. In August we compared Ubuntu and Fedora again along with Xubuntu, Mandriva, and SimplyMEPIS, but using older PC hardware.

I've been a fan of SimplyMEPIS for years. The distribution was one of the early pioneers in the field of user-friendly Linux development, and to this day offers a system that usually "just works." Earlier this month the MEPIS site announced a community variation for older computers based on SimplyMEPIS.

SimplyMepis, or Mepis for short, is a distribution targeted towards new users that has the intended goal of providing a good distribution that is easy to use. Version 7.0, which was my first experience with Mepis was pretty good. But past success means little if the newer version doesn't deliver. So let's see how SimplyMepis 8 does.