Whatever Happened to These Red-Hot Linux Distros?
Once upon a time SimplyMEPIS, Mandrake Linux, and Lindows were popular and generated a lot of attention. Where are they now?
Way back around 2003 entrepreneur and technologist Warren Woodford released the first version of SimplyMEPIS. Mr. Woodford felt that the popular desktop Linux distros had too many rough edges, so he built his own sleek distro based on Debian and KDE 3.1.2. New releases appeared every 6-12 months, and each release was more polished and user-friendly. Nice helper utilities like MEPIS X-Windows Assistant, MEPIS System Assistant, and MEPIS Network Assistant made system administration easier. It hit the upper range of the DistroWatch rankings and stayed there for several years. My friend and colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols called it SimplyMEPIS: The best desktop Linux you haven't tried.
But that was then, and now MEPIS appears to be defunct. SJVN observes that "Back in the day, I loved MEPIS. It was a great desktop distribution. But its founder, Warren Woodford, couldn't make it pay so he's gone on to other projects, and the community he left behind hasn't been able to keep improving it. It really is a shame, but sometimes one person really is essential to a project's success, and that has proven to be the case with Woodford and MEPIS."
