ElleyKitten's Journal: Freespire vs. Mepis

Over the weekend I installed Linux on my friend's old computer. Since she's a Linux newb, and since Linspire recently went free as in Freespire and free CNR, I decided to try out the distro of newbs.

Overall impression of Freespire: Disappointing. I'm not one of those Linux purists who thinks Linspire is all wrong, that mixing proprietary things into Linux is sinful and we need to keep the newbs at bay. I actually respect Linspire for its efforts at making Linux more mainstream. But I'm not impressed with Freespire. It's pretty, but a distro needs more than prettyness, even with newbies. CNR, their click-n-run warehouse that's supposed to be the easiest way to install programs ever, is just a bloated, confusing piece of shit. My friend couldn't figure it out at all, and even I had difficulty navigating its convaluted interface. And it kept crashing, because it used too much memory because it's a bloated piece of shit. Freepire also had a number of other problems on my friends computer. It wouldn't detect her cd drive or usb(even mount didn't work), flash was stuttery, her favorite game (Puzzle Pirates) wouldn't run, and things kept crashing. I went over to the Freespire forums and discovered that other people had simular problems. Unfortunetly, none of the threads had solutions. They had plenty of responses, but all of them were just people saying they had the same problem. Well, that's depressing. So I futzered around with that for a little bit, and then impatient me decided to check out the new Mepis.

I liked Mepis 3.4, and recommended it to people in the past, but I hadn't tried Mepis 6 yet. It turned out to be absolutely perfect for my friend. It recognized all her hardware, Flash worked, her game worked, and no crashes. Synaptic was a little confusing for her, but she liked it better than the gigantic, memory-eating maze that is CNR. It took little effort to get her computer set up to do everything she needs it to do, which after Freespire, was quite a relief. I'm surprised Mepis isn't more well known, it's certainly a great distro.

Mempis

[maotx]

One of the many distros I have yet to try and Freespire has always looked like crap to me. I'm still stuck on Kubuntu though. With a touch of XGL I can't complain.

Automatix and Mepis

[bmo]

If you had been a really good girl, you might have installed and run Automatix for your pet newbie, which works on .deb based systems and officially supports mepis and ubuntu directly.

http://www.getautomatix.com/ [getautomatix.com]

Get it, run it, select the things you want, let it do its dance.

There will be warnings like "this may be illegal in your country" when it comes to decss and whatnot, but I'm of the belief that if I have DVDs that I _bought_ I have the right to view them on whatever hw I wish.

Speaking of which, my ne

Re:

[ElleyKitten]

I usually use EasyUbuntu [freecontrib.org] on Ubuntu installations, but my friend doesn't need anything that's on Automatix or EasyUbuntu that's not included with Mepis, since she doesn't have a DVD drive and I think she'd get confused with all the programs Automatix offers. Thanks for the advice, though.

Re:

[Simon80]

Personally I don't see the fuss of such a script, but I haven't tried it, so I guess I don't have as much perspective. For ordinary users, I suppose it's a good idea, but you only have to mark these packages once per install, and people should be getting comfy with synaptic anyhow.