[S-99]

To excite everyone i hail the news of ubuntu 7.04 feisty fawn is coming out soon if not already by the time people read this.
http://www.ubuntu.com/

Great linux distro based on the all and mighty debian.
Ubuntu normal - gnome desktop
Kubuntu - kde desktop (the best one in my mind that has the most complete desktop(great kde distro, but mepis is better)
Xubuntu - xfce desktop (you may not like this one...it's missing some basic stuff like file search and network browsing, but it has a liter desktop great for people who want fast bootup and uses less resources)
Edubuntu - no one here cares about this one , but i like it's initiative

And of course those of you who want the absolutely best kde debian based distro. There is now all new mepis 6.5 that has come out.
http://www.mepis.com

Mepis - kde desktop (the distro i'm addicted to, and a better livecd that knoppix i think too). Mepis is currently based off of the famously dependable ubuntu dapper drake architecture.

For all of those curious about mepis 6.5, it is also an ubuntu distribution (the creator switched from debian sarge to ubuntu). Mepis 6.5 also has an option that'll let you boot up with video cards utilizing the appropriate driver for what you have(the new mepis now detects what video card you have and try to get going the appropriate driver for full acceleration so you wouldn't have to install the driver manually or even modify xorg(though that's not hard) straight from the livecd as well).
Also mepis 6.5 now comes bundled with beryl which works great (i'm using mepis right now with beryl). You can even bootup with beryl straight from the livecd before you install (think about it, using a desktop that is taken care of by your gpu for once instead of the cpu(ie takes load away for the cpu when it's something your graphics card should be doing soley), also beryl is not slow, it's very fast, doesn't slow down my system one bit.

Check it all out, they're both exciting and cool as hell. And now i'll shutup before i ***** more about how mepis is so great.

[Col. Fishguts]

I've seen beryl in action. It's all the eye candy one could ever want.

[Fury]

That statement goes to the same category as "640KB ought to be enough for everybody", which Gates never said despite its urban legend status.

[S-99]

Well, you'll like these distros

[Fury]

I've used (K)Ubuntu since Dapper and found it to be a great distro. Today I've been using Ubuntu, it's been pretty solid except for these issues;
- The open-source R300 ATI-driver causes random freezing, nothing else but cold reboot can be done. This was solved by installing proprietary ATI driver binaries.
- I have Audigy 2 ZS. Both Edgy and Feisty detects both Audigy and on-board audio even though it's disabled in BIOS. Both Edgy and Feisty have problems in defaulting to Audigy and requires manual editing of config files to blacklist on-board audio from getting used.
- Ubuntu's extra codec metapackage depends on msttcorefonts which includes many Microsoft's fonts. While these fonts may be useful in word processing applications, msttcorefonts also makes many webpages look hideously ugly because they use these fonts. IIRC this is because font smoothing does not work properly on these MS fonts in linux.

But Feisty also brings some notable improvements such as;
- The open-source R300 ATI-driver actually now also works on newer ATI chips too, such as on my R480, too bad it's still not fully functional apparently as it keeps randomly freezing like mentioned above.
- WMA and WMV works without w32codecs after installing extra codecs. But some WMV streams quite didn't play properly and video got garbled.
- Extra codec and proprietary binary driver installation has been made very easy. It's not perfect but far easier for newbies than in previous releases.
- Universe and Multiverse repositories are enabled by default, well naturally as those are required for the extra codecs and binary drivers. But it also makes it easier for users to look for other software in package management as they no longer have to enable those repositories. Not that it's difficult though.

Next I'll try Kubuntu and see how it fares compared to Ubuntu.

[Mars]

Is it worth it to switch from Kubuntu to MEPIS?

[Fury]

No IMHO. I don't see Mepis as a reliable distro because it's just a one man's project. He should join the Kubuntu team instead.

Speaking of Kubuntu. I've been using it a while now. It is almost a necessity to install Gnome's Totem player and gstreamer to provide proper in-browser media playback. Xine libraries and Kaffeine can only launch a separate playback window and xine's playback support today seems to be poor compared to gstreamer's.

In DVD playback Kubuntu's Kaffeine does much better than Ubuntu's Totem however. Where Totem didn't support DVD menus at all, Kaffeine did. This brings me to a serious bug in DVD mounting. In both Debian Etch and Feisty, a bug that prevented DVD medias to mount were reported and was fixed in Etch. Yet this bug was not fixed in Feisty even though a patch was already available before Feisty's release. Seriously, a bug that prevents DVD's from mounting was left?

Interestingly, while I had trouble with ATI's open-source drivers and Audigy in Ubuntu, Kububtu had no problems.

Ever since Dapper, (K)Ubuntu has gained a lot more features and improvements. But it seems that 6 month development cycle is not suited for bug-free releases.

[S-99]

I agree with you partially on mepis there. Mepis's older versions use to be pretty stagnant and didn't have many updates or fixes until warren switched from debian sarge to ubuntu. A very good move and mepis 6 was born. Although mepis 6 was not there greatest release, in fact i think mepis 6 was there worst release, no matter what i did i could not get nvidida-glx loaded even by modifying xorg from nv to nvidia. Mepis 6 was a downer to me because of this. And mepis was one reason i liked it because it asked you if you had an ati or nvidia card, and then it would get the appropriate driver working depending on what you chose. Anyway while mepis 6 sucked i checked out kubuntu again(kubuntu back in the old days sucked balls and was very buggy, and had many kubuntu users go to mepis).

Anyway, when kubuntu got a lot better, kubuntu feisty was a great fall back distro, i loved it. It didn't make a good livecd at all, but the installation was easy, and of course ubuntu is very cooperative when you're trying to make a piece of hardware work all the way(it's very friendly when you modify xorg). Anyway, kubuntu was also very lite, it didn't come with many apps besides the bare necessities(you could have more apps if you downloaded the second cd to go along with it, but this is unnecessary). I remember the only extra thing i downloaded for kubuntu was firefox because konqueror sucks at doing some basic things like logging into hotmail. And i found adept package manager quite nice too. But of course i removed all of adept in favor of synaptic except for the adept updater. The adept updater was handy.

One thing that sucked about kubuntu was that the more updates i got, some applets for stuff i use all the time started disappearing. In kde control center>peripherals>joystick got removed and i couldn't get it back. I took note and knew that mepis doesn't suffer from this. Anyway the new mepis distro is out and it's a great release works all of the way, and the ease of video cards aspect of it has returned as well. And while ubuntu feisty releases didn't come with beryl(they were going to) warren decided to put it in and it works great. It's a little too advanced for the basic user to setup though, and i can understand with ubuntu feisty out that they wanted to wait until beryl had an official release first.

Check out mepis, it's not really the one man's project anymore like what the older versions resemble(i know what you meant by your comment big time)
Of course concerning distros and intermediate users, i'll usually get my friends started up with mepis and they love it, to be friendlier to average users i get them started up with kubuntu and install kubuntu on as many netcafe computers as i can assimilate. Kde is a much better desktop to start out average users with as it's very similar to the windows desktop and that familiarity doesn't scare people. Kde is great, i wonder when kde4 will be out?

[Fury]

KDE4 should be out sometime 4th quarter this year. Addendum to my earlier post about Kubuntu, the problem with R300 driver also affects Kubuntu but freezing happens much more rarely.

I always thought that it was stupid to plan making beryl/compiz standard feature on (K)Ubuntu. The ATI and NVIDIA open-source drivers are just too immature to provide stable, well performing desktop environment composition hardware acceleration. The binary drivers on the other hand doesn't support all the API calls required for proper beryl/compiz support. Maybe someday they will but they are still proprietary drivers which don't belong in any linux distro, but most modern card owners don't have much choice in the matter as the open-source drivers don't support modern cards all too well.

It's a shame that ATI and NVIDIA have continuously refused to publish hardware specifications that would allow creation of proper open-source drivers. I wonder when and if AMD is going to make a move on this area. Should AMD publish specifications to Radeons, NVIDIA wouldn't just sit still and see ATI cards become dominant in unix market.