MX Linux Forum

I've been a Linux user since about 1998 (Redhat 4.2 was my first distro), and I've tried many other distros in the past (Debian, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Elementary, etc).

Although I wouldn't recommend MX Linux as a "complete-noob" distro, I'm really liking it for the following reasons:

• First of all, the community is excellent, and any help I asked for in this forum was answered very quickly! Thank you everyone! This one point alone makes all the little nitpicks easy to overcome.
• XFCE is blazing fast.
• My video driver for hardware acceleration was easy to install. It was an all-graphical process, and this installation tool was included with the default install.
• I did have to spend a good 2-3 hours tweaking it, poring through all the MX tools, and various desktop preferences and settings to get it all nice. A few key takeaways:
  • I have a HiDPI screen. To globally scale the font sizes up and down to match my DPI, I found where to do that in Settings -> Appearance -> "Fonts" tab -> DPI -> Check the "Custom DPI" checkbox, then scale up and down.
  • For nice window shadows and semitransparent windows (when not focused), I found that in Settings -> MX tools -> Tweak -> "Compositor" tab -> pick "Compton" -> "Compton Settings" button -> Check "Enabled client-side shadows on windows", then in the "Opacity" Tab, I made the "Default opacity of inactive windows" 0.85, and the "Opacity of window titlebars and borders" 0.90. I also checked "Blur background of transparent windows".
  • For the theme, on the "Theme" tab (still in the "MX Tweak" tool), I chose "MX Dark", and also checked "Firefox Dark theme tweak", which is important so that you don't have light-colored text being typed into textboxes (in Firefox), whose background is also light-colored! It's really great when a dark theme actually works well in all the places where you need it to! (...and it's actually surprisingly hard to get a dark theme right).
• Nice recent kernels, which can be installed graphically.
• I really like the "MX Snapshot" utility. I make full system backups to an external SSD drive, and they are tiny when done, like only 4 or 5 GB! Well Done!!
• In order to allow installation of snaps, I did have to set up the default of booting to systemd, which was done using the MX "Boot Options" tool. Once snapd was installed and working, I installed several snaps, such as obs-studio, wire, ffmpeg, mattermost (client) and electron-mail.

I would say that intermediate-to-advanced Linux users will really like MX Linux, as I feel it's geared to power users.

Among the things I like about MX is that it has something for users of all experience levels. I'm not sure where I fall on the spectrum but it's certainly somewhere between intermediate and advanced. I can get around most any distro just fine after a while. But that doesn't really mean anything. There are quite a number of folks who think MX is just fine for linux beginners. It may very well be. Not all beginners are alike. It's definitely easy to use, and most definitely easy to install. MX Tools is just awesome.

esbeeb wrote: Thu Apr 18, 2019 11:15 pm I've been a Linux user since about 1998 (Redhat 4.2 was my first distro), and I've tried many other distros in the past (Debian, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Elementary, etc).

Hello esbeeb,
we have something in common. I discovered RedHat in 1999 as I combed trough a "On Special" display which included an old release on a CD for $9.99. I dual-booted for the next 10 years until I bought an iMac in 2009. If Apple had released their new Mac Mini in good time, I would have stayed with Apple but eventually I lost hope and bought a Dell workstation.
Linux has come a long way since then and I am in awe of what we have now. Live USB boots, Blender 2.8, Timeshift and so much more. Amazing!

The other day I booted into Fedora but for some reason, I can no longer relate to Gnome. MX Linux switched me from KDE to Xfce which just clicks with me. Enjoy. - v

I'm not convinced any Linux distro will be newbie friendly. I agree that there is a wide range of newbies. I think MX is relatively newbie friendly IF the newbie is willing to do some of the work themselves. If they aren't inclined to follow directions and read the manual them MX will only get them so far. But if there is someone else setting up the computer for some other user, then MX is great. The mid-level or advanced user can can work out the details and then the user just steps in and uses the system.

Seaken64

MEPIS was my first experience with Linux, and I was a complete newbie. But some of the same people who are here today got me started back then. Today MX is easier to use than MEPIS was 8 years ago. MX Package Installer is great and has the majority of apps newbs are looking for. Installing codecs is another plus. I remember 8 years ago installing everything I could find in synaptic that looked like a codec to me trying to get my music to play :)
It takes a few minutes of reading to install MX. If they are willing to do that, newbies will do great with MX.

A responsible newbie who is willing to do a little reading can easily use MX. For total newbies who are not ready (or willing) to read and study up a little before diving in, I probably recommend Linux Lite, in spite of the Ubuntu base, for the following reasons:

Apps are named for their function, rather than their strange real names. A newbie wouldn't know that Thunar is a file manager, for example, so in Linux Lite it's called "Home Folder."

The Welcome Screen offers all the "best practices" info and links that actually perform the tasks: Updating, installing drivers if needed, etc.

Cool tools, very much like MX.

The installer, of course, is Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer, super-duper newbie-friendly.

Irresponsible newbies can probably use Linux Lite. Responsible newbies who care about stability and reliability should use MX, because it's free of those dangerous beta-software upstream updates that have made Ubuntu famous for "stuff broken after updates."

Welcome to a great distro and a great community!

seaken64 wrote: Fri Apr 19, 2019 2:43 pm I'm not convinced any Linux distro will be newbie friendly.

Well, from my own experience, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Elementary OS were about as newbie-friendly as it gets. So many distros are competing fiercely these days to be as user-friendly as possible, that it's hard to even make a concise list. There's lots of hullabaloo around Pop_OS! as well, for gamers (and a big innovation there is that you download an .iso specific to your graphics chip, and then the hardware acceleration is set up for you, automatically, no questions asked).

seaken64 wrote: Fri Apr 19, 2019 2:43 pm I agree that there is a wide range of newbies.

I agree, and would add that if you are the kind of person who likes Star Trek, then you are also the kind of person who is probably going to love MX Linux. MX Linux is a tweaker's delight. XFCE is perhaps a little too low-key in its appearance, by default, but once you take the time to "sex it up" just the way you like (I just added a few suggestions for appearance-related tweaks in the OP), then it's really impressive, even when compared to other Linux distros who take excruciating pains to get the look and feel as appealing as possible (by default, with no need to tweak, and in fact they might even discourage tweaking, as it will probably introduce subtle problems as side effects).

So in conclusion, I would suggest that before you offer to introduce someone else to MX Linux, maybe just ask yourself: "would this person enjoy Star Trek"?

vancouver wrote: Fri Apr 19, 2019 9:49 am Hello esbeeb,
we have something in common. I discovered RedHat in 1999

That's great! Are you from Vancouver, BC, Canada? I lived there 3 years myself...

vancouver wrote: Fri Apr 19, 2019 9:49 am I can no longer relate to Gnome.

Ditto.

MX Linux is to Linux what Windows 2000 was to Windows. Easy to use, but leaves plenty of options open to advanced users as it doesn't automatically assume the user is an idiot. (hello Windows 8, hello Windows 10)

Perhaps the biggest gap in usability is because Windows is pre-installed on the PC with drivers already there, plus hardware and software support from the PC vendors themselves, and the newbie doesn't have to do anything other than use the operating system. Microsoft put a lot of effort into the out-of-box experience in all versions of Windows prior to Windows 8 (and that's when the fun really began). In reality, installing MX Linux is as easy as installing Windows. With Linux, you're basically installing it all from scratch and this is quite stressful to a newbie.

Connotations have a lot to do with it as well; Windows 8 and 10 aren't brilliant, but people use it because it's Windows and everybody knows Windows and Microsoft Word/Excel/Outlook which runs on Windows.

Although I'm technically a "newbie" (using MX since January/February 2019), my technical experience makes me a lot more tolerant to technical difficulties than a typical newbie, which is something experienced users often take for granted.

esbeeb wrote: Fri Apr 19, 2019 10:43 pm So in conclusion, I would suggest that before you offer to introduce someone else to MX Linux, maybe just ask yourself: "would this person enjoy Star Trek"?

Yes, but which version of Star Trek? ST Original Series requires lots of imagination. STNG and Voyager are laid out for you. DS9 is a whole different paradigm!

AK-47 wrote: Sat Apr 20, 2019 2:39 am Although I'm technically a "newbie" (using MX since January/February 2019), my technical experience makes me a lot more tolerant to technical difficulties than a typical newbie, which is something experienced users often take for granted.

Thanks for saying that. I agree it's not fair to paint all "newbies" with such a broad brush stroke.

The Linux world would do well to do everything it can to target and attract experienced/power users away from Windows and OS X (such as the innovations made by Pop_OS! WRT gamers, that I mentioned above). It's those users who are generally good with technology who will probably appreciate Linux the fastest. It's those power users who have the patience and curiosity to overcome any barriers of entry into the Linux World (the worst of which is usually getting a Linux installer USB stick to boot on an UEFI-guarded PC, or an EFI-guarded Mac). Once they get past the hell-hound of (U)EFI, and through the Narnia closet of the Boot Menu, then they are pretty much home-free, these days.

Sometimes though, power Windows users have certain preconceptions, e.g. they are (IMO) too used to searching the web as their first resort and installing programs via .deb binaries from all manner of locations without checking if the deb package is safe or even compatible in terms of dependencies, instead of searching first in the repositories that are provided by the distro they are using.

Asqwerth, the same is true of power Linux users. Those coming from Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Lubuntu/Mint for example are so used to adding 3rd-party PPAs to get apps that they want that they try to do the same thing in MX before they've read the documentation and learned the MX way of doing things, and next thing they know they've created a FrankenMX that runs amok frightening the local villagers. I'd prefer dealing with a total newbie than someone styling himself a "power user" because the latter sometimes tend to be overconfident and think they know more than they really do, while newbies are more hesitant about possibly breaking things and are more open to reading or at least skimming the docs if you tell them where those are found.

Each distro is different and has its own ways of doing things. PCLinuxOS has its own curated repository, so does MX to an extent but one based on the Debian Stretch repo (plus makes the MX Test repo, Debian Backports and Flatpaks available, albeit at the user's own risk), the *buntus tell you to add any Tom, Dick and Harry's private, untested, unsupported PPAs (shudder), while ParrotOS is another walled garden distro but with barbed wire and machine gun posts on the walls. Linux power users can tend not to take these differences into consideration when they first start using another distro, and tend to approach it as they would the distro that they're used to instead of taking time to learn the new one.