Based on Debian, SimplyMEPIS is gaining lots of popularity - it's now on the top 4 in distrowatch for this month, exceeding Gentoo, Ubuntu and even Debian itself !

I'm not going to write a full reveiw about MEPIS. I'll just tell you why I like it and what I'd like to see fixed.

SimplyMEPIS is a LiveCD, you can run it directly from the CD-ROM or install it to your hard drive. Here is where things get nice - the easiest and fastest installation I've ever seen, with almost no questions asked. Now that's what I call newbie-friendly !

The Desktop itself is clean, everything runs out-of-the-box including mozilla with all the popular plugins (even windows WMV). Some apps just didn't fit the CD, but hey you've got apt-get! Almost all packages can be found in debian software pools, MEPIS is already configured to use a nice mix of "stable", "testing" and "unstable" pools. It also uses the MEPIS pool which includes packages that were modified by the MEPIS team.