There's a school of thought among hardcore Linux users that distros that work straight out of the box are considered Linux with 'training wheels'. The hardcores sometimes look down their noses at such distros. I on the other hand could care less what the hardcore users think. I don't have time to get elbow deep into the guts of a Linux distro. I need something that works now. So imagine my delight when I installed Mepis 7.0 a few months ago. I have never been more happy with a Linux distro since I started using Linux. I would recommend Mepis to beginners too as they have a helpful and friendly community.
Since my switch to Mepis I have tried other distros that have fallen by the wayside for me. Such as Debian, Fedora, Sabayan, Fluxbuntu, Mint 5.0, Ubuntu 8.04, gOS, Elive, and DeLi. Special mention goes out to OpenGEU, this would have been a great and slick distro for me if it wasn't for the fact that it had horrible video playback on my machine.
