An Alternative To Ubuntu

image I recently installed Ubuntu (opens new window) on a desktop computer at work and do like it but as Ubuntu uses Gnome (opens new window) as its Window Manager and I’m a KDE (opens new window) fan (unsure whether this is due to my familiarity with the desktop environment or its extensive feature set), I was still seeking a version of Ubuntu that used KDE instead of Gnome. I was already familiar with Kubuntu (opens new window) but had heard from a few friends that it had bugs so I wasn’t that keen to try it out. Then one of my company’s suppliers told me about Mepis (opens new window) and that it uses the same repositories as Ubuntu and best of all it uses KDE! I installed it on an Acer (opens new window) notebook and it installed with no problems. I thought this was quite impressive considering the recentness of the notebook. I am currently trying to get my Linksys WPC54G Version 3 (opens new window) going using ndiswrapper (opens new window) but haven’t been successful yet. My only complaints are that in my opinion it installs a little too much software by default. For example, it installs Kaquarium, Ksensors, and a whole lot of other utilities that I possibly won’t ever use. I suppose, though, the maintainers of any Linux distribution have to balance ease of installation and the number of applications they will include by default (it was nice,though, to see Skype (opens new window) included in the default install). The base install was about 2 gigabytes, though, and Mepis installs this all to the root partition so ensure you make the root partition large enough.