I intended to wait until the final release before reviewing Simply Mepis, but, The Distro's final shape is pretty much defined in rc2 and I think it's time to take a close look at what's going on.

Warren Woodford, the force behind Mepis, has decided that SimplyMepis is to be a one CD bootable Distro which can be installed to the hard drive and is, of course, still based on testing Debian. One of the primary mandates is that SimplyMepis be useable by some of the less than state of the art hardware and that the application set should be a selection of the best apps, with little duplication or overlap of purpose. The structure of Mepis is still entirely compatible with the testing Debian repository so any other the user wants can be downloaded and installed without a problem. An average user may very well be happy with only the apps included on the CD, but users with more complex needs will not be limited. At the moment, SimplyMepis includes both the 2.6.7 and the 2.4.26 Linux kernels. The final release may only have 2.6.7, but for the moment, 2.4.26 is included for compatibility with some computers.