SimplyMEPIS 3.3 is in its final beta stages, and there appear to be several big changes, as the press release makes clear. Kopete is out; GAIM & Xchat are in (I'm cool with that: Kopete craps out on me often). Synaptic is in - good move there. GNOME is more polished. Sounds good! If you want to download MEPIS, hie thee over to the mirror list & get to downloading. It's just one CD. Easy! (And if you wanna see what you're going to be using, check out the 67 screenshots at OSDir.) ...

I'm on this listserv for web developers, & someone asked what version of Linux he should install on an 8GB partition on his hard drive. He's a newbie, so he needs an easy-to-use Linux. Someone suggested Ubuntu, so I wrote the following: Except that there's no KDE for Ubuntu at all, which means you're missing out on an enormous amount of great software. Ubuntu is GNOME-only, which severely limits it in my book. I'd look at SUSE 9.2 Professional, which you can get from free from anyone who has the software, or Xandros 3, which will cost you $$$ but is probably the easiest to use of any Linux distro I've seen. Then, eventually, you'll move on to Libranet & Debian. :) One person responded by agreeing that I'd made a good point, since it's a good idea to have both KDE & GNOME on a machine. The original recommender of Ubuntu pointed out that it IS in fact possible to install KDE on Ubuntu by enabling the "universe" package repository, but that the reason Ubuntu doesn't ...

One thing that people tend to forget is that open source isn't just about Linux. Apple uses open source stuff in it's products - like it's kernel & web browser for instance - and even MSFT has released a couple of things as open source (and I'm not talking about their b.s. "shared source" license, which doesn't even deserve consideration). In addition, there's actually a lot of great open source software that runs on Windows. When I use XP, for instance, I don't use IE; I use Firefox. I don't use Outlook or Outlook Express; I use Thunderbird. I don't use Office; I use OpenOffice.org. ...