Comparison of Windows 7 and Mepis 8.

Submitted by rich_c on January 13, 2009 - 2:44am

As Windows 7 Beta has become available this week and Mepis 8 Beta was released late last year, I thought it’d be fun to compare the two. I’ll try and base this on facts readily available about features and requirements as I haven’t actually installed and tested Windows 7. I have installed and tested Mepis 8 release candidate 1 (Mepis 7-9-94_RC1) so there may be a bit of bias in favour of that… ;->

System Requirements:
Windows 7. 1gb ram, 1ghz processor, 16gb disk, 128mb graphics card.
Mepis 8. Half of all of that and you’ll be quite happy. Oh and don’t worry too much about the graphics card. Anything should get you going. You might even get by with less but then you’re into antiX 8 public test territory. Lean and Mean!

Install media:
Windows 7. DVD. Install only. What do you mean will it run from the disk? Oh and you can’t install it on a flash drive and try it that way either!
Mepis 8. CD. Live and install. Easy to get a quick first impression! There are instructions available for putting it on a flash drive for a portable installation.

Included apps:
Windows 7. Web browser and Email client and um…..
Mepis 8. A couple of Web browsers, PIM suite, parts of an Office suite and more. Some things have been left out so it’ll all fit on a CD but it’s easily installable from the repositories.

Upgradeability:
Windows 7. You can use it until August 2009. Then you will pay!
Mepis 8. Keep upgrading it until the final is released and beyond. Pay a contribution if you want.

Can you upgrade from an older version?
Windows 7. Unclear at this time. Probably from Vista. Probably not from XP. Certainly not from anything older!
Mepis 8. Also still unclear. May be technically achievable from Mepis 7. Not recommended at all from the Mepis 6 series. You might get lucky from the earlier versions but would you want to try?

Looks like:
Windows 7. Apparently it appears the KDE4 team have been moonlighting and providing Microsoft with some of their features. But they missed some out too.
Mepis 8. The Mepis community have been busy providing a bit of a fresher, sharper look. Nice job! KDE3.5 still doing the business. The general consensus is that KDE4 isn’t quite ready. It’s likely that converting from XP would be less of a shock if you went to Mepis than if you went to Vista or W7, from a user point of view.
(OK, maybe this section is a little tongue in cheek!)

Would you recommend someone use it on their main PC?:
Windows 7. No. I don’t think anyone would. Of course this may change.
Mepis 8. Yes! Even back with the first Beta people were installing on their main system. My personal opinion is that Mepis 8 RC1 is ready for general use. I’m backing this up by installing it on a system I’m refurbishing for someone.

I could go on, but I think I’ll stop there. I’ll conclude with my credit crunch friendly tip. Go for Mepis 8. You can refresh your older hardware and if you want to contribute financially, you can pay what you can afford. Or you can contribute by helping the community with advice, experience, artwork, software packages etc. I hope I’ve stuck to the facts in the above. Feel free to correct me if I’ve got it wrong.

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