P.S. I run Mepis. I have no problem saving files and sharing them across a local network. It is not slow at all, and most things work by default, including all the hardware I attach to the machines I work with.
Well, except for a printer or two...
And if you don’t like the default desktop or think it is slowing your machine down a bit, you can easily change to another (like Xfce for example) to see if that works better for you.
Gnome and Cinnamon are popular choices as well, if a bit more demanding of system resources.
When I said slooow and sharing files - I meant when running in the mode when you’re just running with a Live DVD disk. Everytime I’ve done this (usually for rescue purposes) the system literally crawls because the access time for an optical disk is orders of magnitude slower than for a typical hard disk. I don’t know Mepis but if it’s a typical linux distro it should be as good as any other - I use Fedora by preference and Ubuntu at work - it’s not the distro I’m concerned with it’s the notion that taking a windows laptop say and shoving a “Live disk” in is going to give a windows user any information or an experience that they’re going to be able to capitalize on. Unless the lesson is that linux doesn’t have tails and a horn and that your browser looks the same as it did before but if that’s the lesson you need then you might as well forget it anyways ...