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There's no need to wait several years, Linux is already ready for the desktop. If you don't believe me check out Mephis, Knoppix, or Xandros.

I presonally prefer Gentoo Linux becouse of the freedom you have in choosing what applications you want on your computer, though for a noob, it is a bit daunting.

Now it's time to catch up with distros that are way easier to use than XP and have interfaces that also do much more:

• Knoppix boots just about anything.
• Mepis does the same and gives you an install GUI. The new version gives you KDE 3.2, which kicks any proprietary interface's ass, and was used to make this post.
• Feather Linux nice for older computers and dead easy to use.

The Free and Open source comments quoted were true when they were written, but are not anymore. People really have gotten into the works enough to make many usable and easy interfaces. Like other "Free software will never do X" arguments, this one was false.

The gentle reader may remember these famous predictions. Free Software will never:

• make a kernel
• be useful in the Enterprise
• make anyone any money
• be able to work devices

As free software generated billions of dollars for big and small companies alike, runs on all manner of hardware for all kinds of companies that demand scalability and stability, we could be sure easy to use, polished interfaces were right around the conner. They are here and available to anyone with a good network connection.

Michelle, download and run Mepis today.

Same here. I opted for linux at the begining of the term when I kept having some problems with Windows and could not spend the time to trouble shoot it. My flavor of choice is MEPIS, based on Debianand is still in beta, but fairly smooth for my needs and a simple install with a fairly good forums for help. My only problems with Linux now is that I spend too much time exploring and learning the system, and not enough time on my studies. I can't wait until the term is over.

You'll get all kinds of software quickly and correctly installed. If there are incompatabilities you'll know right away. If you are generally impressed--- and I think these distributions are getting very impressive--- you have a good head start.

If you aren't generally impressed, you can look into anything that caught your eye and see if its ported to your OS of choice.

-Tupper

Have you tried a Mepis install? It runs like Knoppix off a CD and has a GUI installer right on the desktop. The job is done in 15 minutes.

www.mepis.org is what we used for our newbie class and it worked great. Bob can learn what he needs to know from mepis, that free software rocks. Sooner or later, Bob will want to take off his training wheels.

Harrrr!

I gave my wife Debian. I can ssh into it and update it whenever I feel the need. It's easy, she loves it and I've never looked back. No more fucking around with Gator, attachments you can't get or any of those other Broken Windoze things that make for better billing than use. For those of you who don't want to spend too much time configuring things, install Mepis, God's gift of Debian for the masses.

It's getting better all the time.

Sorry you got snagged at the website. It is available though, and real smooth install wise once you have the iso/CD.

Its understandable from the MEPIS point of view, if its easier to buy it than to find it on the site, they get more funding. If you're strapped for cash its nice that it's available if you're willing to look for it.

You seem to fit in caterory three, you won't pay for it, you're not worried enough to give it a good hard look and you have an alternative that you're happy enough with.

For those discontented few with little inclination to pay...
Heres where to get the CD images.

Once you get it running (which is remarkably easy), it's very much like Debian on the inside. KDE comes nicely preconfigured, desktop setup I find to be excellent (FAR superior to recent Mandrake releases on utterly basic issues like default font readability). MEPIS also works well as an easy-setup, no-fuss personal server box. I wanted a Debian-based server for my Asterisk system, but didn't feel like dealing with a time-consuming install, and wanted something I could test for hardware compatibility right away with a bootable CD. Most critically, I wanted something that came with out-of-the-box support for NVidia motherboards to avoid the hassle of having to separately download and burn to CD all the NForce (and NVidia graphics) drivers so you can compile and install them to get your NForce2 motherboard working properly (no ethernet until you install them, makes it hard to get online to fetch the drivers, and pain-in-the-butt ensues). MEPIS worked out of the box, Mandrake took a couple of hours of compiling and installing different versions of the NVidia drivers to get things working perfectly.

The only thing I don't particularly like about MEPIS is that it lack the sheer volume of documentation that other distros have. Luckily, you can almost always do things the standard Debian way - but trying to figure out if there's some lovely preinstalled KDE tool for package/configuration management or whatever to handle some particular issue is just not as thoroughly addressed as it is with Mandrake, for example (which is still the king of a good GUI tool package out of the box, and there's TONS of info on distro-specific HOWTO stuff). It took me half an hour to figure out how to make sure the SSH daemon was getting started at startup before I figured out the Debian way to do it is dpkg-reconfigure ssh (I am a RedHat guy by background, and a Mandrake user in recent years, so this stuff is not obvious to me, as the Debian init system is completely different). Oh yeah, and MEPIS is a shitty name. I think they'd be growing even faster with a less lame sounding name - something you could be proud to show to your friends. Knoppix - that sounds cool. So does Red Hat... Debian is alright... MEPIS is just terrible.

The Lizard.

MySQL.

GNU Project.

Slackware Linux.

Mepis Linux.

K Desktop Environment.

Gnome.

Perl.

Apache WebServer.

Roxen WebServer (very intuitive, and GPL!).

Phew!! And that's a short list!! There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of open source, free-for-all applications.... so many it's almost absurd not to use them!! Go ahead and get them!

It's actually not that hard. With Debian, installing apps is just a simple "aptitude update; aptitude install [package name]." For starters, get a copy of MEPIS Linux which is based off Knoppix, but makes for a cleaner, closer-to-Debian install. Dig around on the website - they want you to pay, but you can get an ISO free of charge. Burn it, boot it, you'll have an off-CD KDE 3.1.4 environment on kernel 2.4.22. When KDE 3.2 hits the "unstable" distro, you'll have it when you do a "aptitude update; aptitude dist-upgrade". KPackage is a decent GUI to APT, if you prefer. But the command line is much faster. Before you can install any apps, though, you've got to install on your hard drive. The MEPIS Installation Center will help you. You can set up your partitions with QTParted from there. Once you've got an installation, feel free to screw around. Don't worry about it, just try it out. If you don't feel like installing right away, you can use many, many apps right off the booted CD. Any questions, I hang out in #debian and #debian-kde and #mepis on irc.freenode.net as sirReal.

I mean, Debian with KDE? Wow man - debian-fanboys look at you in a very frightning way... ;)
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? KDE in Debian unstable is 3.1.5 currently, and will be 3.2.0 within a couple days. I've had unofficial packages of 3.2b2 and 3.2rc1 since the official trees were tagged. They work great. I will, however, be lurking in #debian-kde@freenode so I can get the news when the packaging is done.

tried Debian (installation simply sucks)
The new installer is much better. It's not graphical (it shouldn't be) but it's easy as pie. Also, there are numberous LiveCD installers for Debian - none are official however. Some are faithful to Debian standards, some have trouble but are still okay.

I'm a Debian user, but my fanboyism belongs to Free Software. So use your Gentoo if that makes you happy. Just don't bullshit about other distros.

They are already there. Get you some Mepis today. Mepis is a Debian based distro, much like KDE. It autoconfigures itself in a way that M$ with it's goofey propriatory reboot required drivers can only dream of. More interestingly, it has a graphical install that sticks the working and configured OS onto your hard drive. Click and drool has arived in free software and it comes clean, without security problems, and with all the goodies that larder M$ - office productivity suits.

DRM, embeded in hardware, is Microsoft's last ditch attempt to stop the comming avalanch of free software use. Rather than being forced to throw away your old computer so that you can get XP, people are going to save themselves loads of money and trouble with CDs like Mepis. Once you discover free software you don't go back because you discover how badly you have been lied to about free software by comercial software companies. Microsoft can not compete on merits, so they are trying to make it technically and legally imposible for others to do anything.

The Debian social contract is a pretty good indicator of their intentions.

Maybe have a look at the history of the project as well.

Debian is by far the most stable and easy to maintain distro I have ever used. Nothing comes close for a server. For Debian with a desktop flavor check out Mepis. Mepis is a Debian-based distro so you get the Debian package management with a better installer and some more up-to-date packages. Mepis rview.

and their logo looks like somebody picking their nose. wtf?

There seems to be a lot of the "waaa Linux is always copying Windows" type of comment on these articles. Yeah, copying Windows is lame. Lots of folks suggest "coming up with some new idea to wow everyone" - well, I haven't seen one worth pursuing yet.

In the meantime, I think we would to well to try and dupe MacOSX - I hereby command all you Slashdot junkies to band together and create a Linux distro inspired by Knoppix, or better yet MEPIS, that duplicates the look of OSX. Many Windows users are closet Macophiles, but they're trapped in their hardware and software configuration. Give them an OSX-y Linux with OpenOffice.org and they'll drop Windows like the bad habit that it is.

While we're at it, make the installer automagically import all their emails, favorites and My Documents directory. OK ready, set GO!

What finally got me to try Linux is when I read a post on Slashdot about Mepis, which, like Knoppix, is a Linux distribution on a bootable CD. While I'd been aching to give Linux a try for years, I never had a spare box to run it, and I wasn't about to wipe XP and all my stuff off my main computer. If you haven't heard about it, Mepis is a full linux install and suite of software that you can boot off a CD and play with, without wiping your existing operating system from your hard drive.

After trying Mepis for just a couple hours, I fell in love. Everything from my optical mouse to my Nvidia drivers to my keychain drive worked without any installation. I'm going to go on using XP on my current box, but I now know that the Linux desktop is indeed ready for prime time. When I upgrade to a new system next year, Microsoft won't get a penny. I'm going to buy a whitebox system, and get myself a good Linux distribution.

I don't care how polished Linux gets; I think the only way it's ever going to get exposure to general users is on Mepis/Knoppix style CD ROMs that let people take the OS for a test drive. I really think that the best way to bring Linux to the general public is to distribute as many ten-cent CD ROMs as you can to friends and family, so they can see for themselves that there's no need to pay the Microsoft tax on their next PC purchase.

The way I see it, overcoming Microsoft's hegemony requires working on two fronts. The first is building quality distributions that work plug-and-play with everything from printers to wireless cards. And the second front is the creation of full-featured bootable CD's that let people see -- on their own machine -- how great Linux has become.

My expreience: 8.2 and 9.1 were great. 9.0 and 9.2 were buggy.

I since moved to MEPIS which also runs off a live CD, has a USB key feature and the HD install involves double clicking a link on the desktop.
It's Debian based and has a ton of things pre-configured by default (things like Java and browser plugins).

MEPIS would be a great choice.
Debian based, runs off the CD and the install consists of double clicking on a shortcut on the desktop, answering 2 or 3 questions and waiting for everything to be installed.

I've been reading Slashdot for years, and I've been wanting to give Linux a try. Yesterday, I downloaded Mepis and burned it onto a CD to use as a Linux startup disk. This disk contains a full debian-based installation, plus all the basic apps you could want. The idea is that you can boot it in with any reasonably current computer and get a good idea if Linux offers enough to be ready for your desktop.

I'm a writer, and not a hugely technical person. And I've never had a spare computer and the time to install Linux. But with this Mepis disk, I was able to take Linux for a spin on my Vaio, leaving XP fully intact, and without there being any chance of messing up my system.

And I gotta tell you, Linux on the desktop is ready for prime time. Booting from my Mepis disk, I was soon toying around with OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc. And none of this took any configuration work on my part. My mouse, usb flash drive, and even my Nvidea display drivers all pre-loaded automatically. And I was connected to my cable modem with zero configuration -- from the moment I loaded Mozilla, I was online.

I could not have been more impressed. So as to the parent post's claim, "And please don't give me that crap about how Linux is ready for the desktop. It's not." -- I beg to differ. I think Linux is ready for prime time. I fell in love with Mepis in the two hours I played with it, and my next computer will be bought without a cent going to Microsoft.

I am sure PCLinuxOS probably does as good a job, knowing the quality of all the old Texstar RPMs. I predict we'll all be hearing a lot more from these upstarts, and see them presenting a serious challenge to the most popular distros, especially with the major PR fuckup that RedHat has brought upon itself with Fedora (sorry, it had to be said) and with the middling quality of the Mandrake 9.2 release (as with the last several Mandrake releases, unfortunately - always _almost_ great).

I just had a look at some of the screenshots for Mepis. I gotta say that Xandros looks a lot more polished and for people switching from Windows (it's target audience I'm guessing) that's what they expect and need. N00bs need a bit of eye candy to make them feel at home sometimes ;)
That said I haven't used either, only checked the screenshots but there you go. *grain of salt*

Easy to use and Debian based? Why would anyone use this when there's a free distro called Mepis that appears to do all of this already?

It shows me an ad for OSDN devchannel.org. Maybe you're using windows and a spyware program on your computer is replacing the ads?

Why not boot a mepis (debian) live CD, and try again?

I hear MEPIS is a Debian install done friendly and well.

I wanna be insightful too!

4. Reinstall entire OS just to remove Knoppix-specific packages

For all you folks who have a dislike for the Debian installer, some have suggested Knoppix. However, Knoppix installs are definitely not pure debian, and some Knoppix-specific packages are quite difficult to remove without disturbing the rest of the system.

MEPIS Linux has very similar hardware autodetection to Knoppix, and its CD is bootable. It offers a pure Debian install, plus a few GUI system tools. The install is ridiculously simple, requiring only that you tell it what partitions to put /, /home (can be same as /), and swap on. It proceeds to format and install in *one* step. A tad more configuration and you're ready to reboot into your new OS.

My install took all of 25 minutes, including the formatting of a total of 40GB of hard drive space.

Click Here for the reason this distribution is called MEPIS.

I just gotta say, that's the most obscure, and possibly one of the dumbest distro names ever. Okay, Yggdrasil was slightly more obscure, but in a cool way.

Regards, WPostma/Franciscan

Mepis - Live Debain-based distro which you can also install to your harddrive THROUGH the liveCD version.

Good stuff - I've been running it as my primary distro for months now.

I've been using a Debain-based distro called MEPIS for several months now. FWIW, I've contributed to the developer because I really dig this OS.

It features a live CD like Knoppix and lets you install the distro through the live CD w/an installation application. In addition - the hardware detection was damn near flawless - talk about your easy install of Debain!!