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 ...
Many of the newer distros have the option of burning the OS image to a flash drive, which I understand is significantly faster than running from an optical disk. Have you tried that yet?
Also, I was under the opinion that pretty much everyone understood that running programs off of an optical disc would be slow in comparison to installing onto a hard drive and operating from there. However yes, running off of a bootable drive allows one to familiarize oneself with the OS/programs on the disc and become comfortable with using them, without changing the configuration of the machine you are using it on or affecting its programs, data, or files.
With no chance of unwittingly changing the makeup of your machine or damaging anything, why not take a chance?