Interview tonight with Warren

Scott · Post by **Scott** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 12:17 pm

When you interview Warren tonight can you ask him what the status is about him moving Mepis to another city? See if you can get an idea of what his list of finalists is. I had commented on the Mepis blog and was just curious as to how that was going.

Post by **Patrick** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 12:25 pm

The interview with Warren is next week:
http://www.tllts.info/calendar/calendar ... 7&month=04

Thanks for the questions. Please join us live on the IRC.

jaz · Post by **jaz** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 2:54 pm

Wow TLLTS "stock" must be really high for you to get Warren on the day 6.5 is released, great timing!

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 3:04 pm

Er, SimplyMEPIS 6.5 was just released today, they won't be getting Warren on 'till next week.

jaz · Post by **jaz** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 3:10 pm

Wally, I guess I did miss the word next.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 5:01 pm

Huh - I'll be interested to see what the new version looks like. Whatever "current" iso I downloaded a few weeks ago was somewhat out of date - based on dapper and breezy IIRC. I'm also wondering what his vision for mepis is at this point. I'll be interested to see whether he has reused the kubuntu kde or if he's rolling his own since if he isn't using the kubuntu patches I might want to run it on my lappy.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 11:30 pm

Nothing against Warren or MEPIS, but for the MEPIS users around here, if there are any, what do you feel that it offers that Ubuntu or vanilla Debian doesn't? I've taken a look at MEPIS every now and then, and I don't mean to sound harsh, but I can't help but feel that it's just another Debian/Ubuntu offshoot that isn't doing anything new or original. What compelling reasons are there to use it over Ubuntu Feisty for example?

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 7:14 am

I'm pretty sure Mepis does their own KDE. Just from reading some reviews on the Internet, I've come to think of Mepis as what Kubuntu should have been, an Ubuntu base with a proper KDE. I'm still playing with Ubuntu and Gnome at the moment, but once KDE4 comes out, I'm sure I'll be looking for a distro to use it on, and so far Mepis is high on my list.

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 9:36 am

Wally Balljacker wrote:Nothing against Warren or MEPIS, but for the MEPIS users around here, if there are any, what do you feel that it offers that Ubuntu or vanilla Debian doesn't? I've taken a look at MEPIS every now and then, and I don't mean to sound harsh, but I can't help but feel that it's just another Debian/Ubuntu offshoot that isn't doing anything new or original. What compelling reasons are there to use it over Ubuntu Feisty for example?

I used to love Mepis back in the 3.0 days. I have Mepis to thank for getting me into Linux, but I have moved on. Back 2 1/2 years ago things were very different. Knoppix was not easy to get working in a hard drive install. Debian Unstable was very stable, or at least seemed to be. There was no Ubuntu. There was no Kubuntu. There were not lots of distros that had all of the codecs and players to do what you wanted. There were only about 50 people in this forum, and we didn't have bashpodder. There was no LottaLinuxLink or Linux Reality. Debian's installer was cursed as much as it was praised. Most of the non commercial distros had poor GUI setup programs and installers.

Mepis seemed to fill a gap at that time. It was a newbie simple install that just worked (Kind of the way people talk about Ubuntu today). Warren had coded some beautiful GUI setup tools, that worked great. His installer was tops in my opinion. He had all of the wonderful goodness of Debian backing him up.

I've moved on though. Mepis and Warren seemed to be more interested in moving into a commercial distro, which is fine, but not what I wanted. I did not want to be using a distro and then one day to upgrade or get support I needed to start paying some unknown price down the road. I got to the point where I did not need GUI installers, and GUI setup programs. Instead I started to fall in love with the Linux CLI, and now I want to know the CLI way of doing things. I also don't feel comfortable using a cousin of Debian which is twice removed. It seems like if I wanted to use Ubuntu I would use Ubuntu I wouldn't use the following chain Debian - Ubuntu - Mepis. Having installed and used Debian Etch I feel like getting away from all the Debian "based" distros and just start using and supporting Debian testing which I have found to be very stable.

I also believe Warren lost a lot of his users during the "unstablity" of Debian Unstable. "Apt-get dist-upgrade" would frequently break important things like X for a while, which frustrated a lot of users. Not really Warren's fault and probably a big reason why he went with Ubuntu as his base now. In fact Debian Unstable affected other distros built off of it like Kanotix (another past favorite for me).

I don't know what Warren's plans are for the future. Does he still want to go in the direction of a commercial model? Does he want to go the route of Ubuntu which will always have a free distro, but sell support? For right now I would tell people to use Ubuntu for an easy to use experience, DSL for older computers, and Debian Etch for getting into Linux and really learning linux or Slackware. I do believe Warren is incredibly talented GUI programer. His GUI's got me into Linux and kept me happy as I learned the OS, and I will always thank him for that. But long term I found other distros ran faster on the same hardware.

I'm glad you are having him on, because his talents deserve to be praised, and his distro deserves some face time too.