MX Linux, The beloved distro of many veteran penguins
Long-time Linux users love it, and new users will have the help they need.
Hello there,
Welcome to my operating systems testing series. This time I am going to talk about MX Linux, you probably heard about it or had it suggested If you asked a group of Linux oldtimers. Why did they? and why you would like it or not? We will dive into that in this article.
MX Linux is a result of an alliance between AntiX devs and the MX Linux community. Both distributions are systemD-free and Debian-based with some of the unique characteristics to each of them.
From the start - which is the boot - I noticed the attention of giving options and choices to both experienced users and regular end users/beginners. At the boot screen, you have the choice to either stare at the nice boot screen or switch to the text mode and have a look at what’s happening during the boot process. At the bottom of the screen, you have your keybindings displayed to help you do so.
Right after the boot, I went straight away to the installation after checking out the default desktop, which looks too nice to be called Xfce. But, hey, it seems Xfce can look good too (unless you have an old TFT or a VA screen, which is a pure abomination).
Once you’re in the MX Linux Installer, I found it carrying the same experience as in the boot screen. At the left, there is a column with two tabs. The first is “Help” which serves to explain what is going on on the right side and what every option during the installation process is about, which is very helpful for beginners and casual/non-tech-savvy users. The second tab is “Live Log” which is basically the same thing as the text mode I mentioned earlier for the boot sequence which is helpful for devs and advanced users to diagnose, debug, or simply have an in-depth look at the installation process.
One more neat thing you’ll find during the installation is the ability to save every change you did to the live desktop environment - which as far as I know, is only found in MX Linux and antiX unless I’m mistaken - so you won’t lose all the customizations you made when you got absorbed by the never-ending menus and windows of fine-tuning and tweaks that MX Linux packs.
After completing the installation and rebooting from the computer’s disk, the nice surprises did continue. At first boot, I was welcomed with, you guessed it, a Welcome screen. MX Linux’s welcome screen has just enough to get you on the right path without feeling like missing attention. It doesn’t have lots of text to explain what every icon in it does because the icons themselves and their titles are self-explanatory and all that work of writing long descriptions that barely anyone reads is a lot of time wasted. If you still don’t know what that icon is about, click the darn thing. And if you didn’t lose track of time customizing your desktop earlier in the live session, now is your chance to do so!
I’m a Brave browser user, and you can imagine my joy when I clicked on “Popular Apps” in the Welcome screen to find that the Brave repo is already added and installing Brave is two clicks away. It is also a one-stop shop for all applications you may need to add to your system as you’ll find a nicely gathered list of applications organized by categories. It also allows installing a full desktop environment with one case selection before clicking “Install”. Talking about software availability, I still got one more surprise. For the first time, EVER, I found the Gconf Library already installed, which I need to install every time to be able to use my notes app “Turtl”. Thank you! One more software-related perk, the distribution added support for Flatpak but they make it clear they’re not taking responsibility for how Flatpak packages behave, it is only added for users’ convenience.
Everything mostly went well with my testing of MX Linux this week (Sept, 24 to Oct, 01). I say almost because I had a few hiccups related to what may be considered a niche. I wanted to install a utility to manage the CPU governor as my computer keeps getting hot (over 50 and up to 70 degrees Celcius) even after cleaning it and using new thermal paste TWICE. (I used Arctic MX-4 which is a very good quality paste, and I swear I didn’t plan to write it on an MX Linux review, It just happened. lol ). I searched on Synaptics, no dice. I tried a DuckduckGo search and it landed links to the MX forums dating back to 2017 where it is mentioned that indicator-cpufreq is available in the test repo and I thought it would be out of that repository to the main one in four years but no. I didn’t bother adding the test repository and went with the second proposition of configuring TLP. In order to do that, I wanted to use the GUI tool TLP-UI, except it’s not available in the main repositories but, again, in the test repository. So I just fired up Vim and did the configuration that way. Also, every tutorial on the internet has commands for SystemD which are useless in MX Linux, and every other non systemD distribution.
I had lots of nice surprises since I started using MX Linux but the one with Telegram-Desktop wasn’t. The available version in the main repository is 1.5.11 while the latest is 3.1.1 which I guess is also in the test repository for now, maybe. So I defaulted to use the already downloaded Telegram binary on my disk.
One more not-nice thing I’d say is related to Xfce. MX Linux did great work in giving an out-of-the-box fantastic Xfce desktop. No matter how much I try, I find some little things that make it feel outdated, which are mostly related to the panels. The app lunchers and the actual apps when lunched are not grouped in one Icon. The battery percentage isn’t displayed inside the gauge (not limited to Xfce, for now, I only found it possible in Budgie and another distro that I forgot, which might be KDE), the panel’s transparency is also applied to items that should stay opaque, and no way to make the panel disable transparency when an application is on full window mode.
There are also the KDE and Fluxbox editions that will for sure provide a different experience, but I always go for the main flavor in my testings. Installing Bugie or many other Desktop Environments is possible easily through the Popular Apps application as already mentioned above.
My experience with MX Linux was really good, especially that the little annoyances I had are still solvable by using the test repository and giving a different panel a try or even replace it with a dock. But that’s for who will use it for the long term, not me.
I highly encourage anyone to give it a try and not be shy to reach to MX Linux and AntiX’s vibrant communities for help. You can also reach users that will gladly help you over MeWe on Linux or Linux and open source users groups. But before that, please do your search-fu on your favorite search engine.
As always, I hope this was informative and see you in the next one. Thanks for reading.