“In this interview, Warren explains the secret to his distro’s rapid and widespread proliferation. Give desktop customers what they want: a simple, reliable set of applications that are easy to acquire, install, and use. Give it away for free. Always.”
Nope. I am very excited about MepisLITE, their version of Linux with KDE that runs _well_ on older hardware. However, you can download and use it’s beta version for free, they are not going to make final version public. That sucks.
“A simple, reliable set of applications that are easy to acquire, install, and use. Give it away for free. Always.”
That is the most simple, obvious, and brilliant philosophy on software ever.
Visions of grandeur. For merely a hobby, he speaks most enthusiastically, and of mainly one theme: making money.
I’ve tried Mepis and it makes for a decent desktop OS, in its limited scope. But it’s a long road to beat Novell and Red Hat in the server arena, nevermind MS. I think Warren should focus on building the DCCA. Members will find more success delivering and supporting pure Debian solutions than concocting a million quasi derivatives.
And let’s never forget, the DCCA needs Debian and not the other way around.
>Visions of grandeur. For merely a hobby, he speaks most enthusiastically, and of mainly one theme: making money.
how silly to think he might sell subscriptions and t-shirts to support his distribution! Clearly, he’s a money-grubber. It’s hard to belive the support MEPIS gets considering these hardline tactics. His open support for Debian is a sham.
>And let’s never forget, the DCCA needs Debian and not the other way around.
More defensive non-sense from the small but vocal numbers of Debian users threatened by ANY suggestion that Debian would benefit from “outside” input. DCCA hardly seems to be a predatory initiative, though you know that Ian character just might try to hijack the Debian community…
From TFA:
“Those of us who want to go the corporate route to take a collaborative attitude, and be very respectful and appreciative of the open source community, and give back whatever we have the ability to give back, and keep that community alive and vibrant at the same time. Hopefully, they won’t hate us for wanting to make a living.”
C’mon…the guy packages things for you and does his damn hardest to see to it that everything works well with everything else and all he wants to do is make a living…not get rich, not be the next Bill Gates–just make a living. Let’s not hate ‘im for it…’kay?
–bornagainpenguin
I don’t use Mepis regularly, but have used it a number of times in the past, and it’s definitely (in my opinion) one of the better Debian forks. New users to Linux should find it particularly easy to use, either from the live-cd, or when installed to the hard drive.
I don’t think it’s fair to call Warren a money grubber-no one has to use MEPSIS if they don’t want to, I prefer Fedora myself. Warren is not telling anyone they have to use MEPSIS or even suggesting MEPSIS is the best solution for everyone. He is doing something he half enjoyns and he would like to make some moeny at the same time; nothing wrong with that.
The questions from the article were tilted towards the area of making money, so Warren answered to that. He mentioned CD’s and subscriptions, but he also referred to essentially consulting to corporations, which he seemed more optimisitc to making money on than CD’s. The CD’s probably cover some bandwidth costs and not much else, and no one is suggesting otherwise.
I should have followed my money grubbing comment with a [note sarcasm] notice.
Warren has a lot to be proud of. I use Mepis, along with a number of other Distro’s, and find it to be a great combination of simplicity and configurabilty. Compatibility with Debian is a great plus.
Is that the best they could do? That’s almost as bad as the CPU names AMD & Intel are coming up with now. And speaking of crappy names, Mandriva? How about WomanDriva, at least that has a funny sexist derrogatory connotation. Mandriva just sounds like gay anal rape.
Despite the ugly and bloated default desktop Mepis has, it has a nice reputation. I think “out of the box” phylosophy is winning users in this case. Anyways, you can compare Mepis’ default look with say Slax:
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/204/6.gif
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/390_or/3.png
I guess everyone else missed this little tibit:
“We also know that we hit number one at DistroWatch last January, despite the fact that Ubuntu has been stacking the deck by directing traffic to Distro Watch.”
–Warren Woodford (from TFA)
So ummm…does this mean that distrowatch is no longer appropriate as a frame of reference?
/magic 8-ball: Signs point towards yes.
Definite flamebait. Very broad too…who is he accusing of stacking the deck? Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth? The Ubuntu community?
Distrowatch rankings are a measure of community interest and enthusiasm, nothing more, nothing less. I haven’t seen a thing to indicate anything untoward going on.
Mepis truly does just work, It comes with easy to use applications, all browser plugins are installed, win32codecs is installed, (not sure about libdvdcss), and everything just works.
When I recommend a distro to a newb, it is typically SimplyMepis, my ex girl friend installed it on her computer and it even autodetected and did most of the setup on her wireless card.
Very good work Warren, best of luck to you and I hope your linux business endeavor pans out.
It is just a good read about Warren and Mepis.
FYI: I am not a Mepis user; but its worth the read. In addition, I think he is on track with alot of his ideas.