MEPIS 11 Is Finally Here!

This is a quick post to say that the final version of MEPIS 11 has been officially announced!

That was a long wait, but it was definitely worth the patience!

I don't have a MEPIS 11 DVD because I have been running MEPIS 11 for some time now (I installed one of the betas and upgraded progressively until final), so I'll have to burn one soon.

Now, if I had to mention "negative" aspects, I guess I'd say:

1. Lack of multilingual options (although you can easily install locales from the repositories)

2. Increase in the size of the iso: now MEPIS comes as a live DVD.

That's all in my case. MEPIS has fulfilled all its promises and more on the hardware I have and the other PCs I've managed to test it on.

What do I like best of MEPIS 11?

This may sound weird (especially to some Windows readers), but what I like best of this release is that it let me get involved a bit more with the community and feel for myself the human side of Linux. During the testing stages, my bug reports and suggestions were taken seriously. In fact, all the issues I reported are gone. I was also able to help other users who experienced the same issues I had during the test stages with my temporary workarounds. Nothing fancy there, just little things that I tried and seemed to work, so I shared them and worked for the other people.

Along with that, the community gave me the chance to contribute with the very little aspects I was capable of. No, I'm not a Linux guru (and judging by my learning rate I'll never be,) so my modest contributions were what a newbie could do. Still, the more seasoned members let me feel their appreciation and encouraged me to keep helping. Boy, I'm thankful for that!

As Mechatotoro said when he wrote about the faces behind the distros, the human interaction of Linux is powerful. It is indeed refreshing to be treated as a human being and not as a number in a sales figure!