MX Linux Forum

Debian since the... ehm, long time ago? Raspbian on RPIs.

Also tried *ubuntu, Mint, and Neon - but never on my main machine.

@Cristobal , I agree that the ease of use with MX makes it a good choice. But I like to experiment and look at different things. If I weren't so pleased with MX and antiX I would probably be an everyday Q4OS Trinity user.

Seaken64

It's funny. In the past I bounced between two seemingly opposites: Debian and Arch.
I'd get bored with Debian and install Arch. Then some update would mess me up an an awkward time and I'd go back to Debian for the stability.

Happy with MX

Fedora is the "fun" distro for seeing what's shiny and new and testing all that out. Not very useful at all otherwise though unless you're a developer who absolutely insists on using the latest packages.

There are many other distros beyond that that I would recommend, but I'm making a dedicated video that will cover a bunch of Linux stuff for former Windows power users, so you'll all just have to wait for that. But at the end of the day, MX definitely takes home the 1st prize as the best main workhorse distro, being both incredibly versatile and incredibly stable.

seaken64 wrote: Tue Aug 16, 2022 12:23 pm @Cristobal , I agree that the ease of use with MX makes it a good choice. But I like to experiment and look at different things. If I weren't so pleased with MX and antiX I would probably be an everyday Q4OS Trinity user.

Seaken64

My main concerns were:
- installing openvpn (and the network manager) in order to use the config files from my VPN provider
- not being able to find most of the app I use in MX (and available from their repo)

Other than that, I agree with with you, Q4OS seems to be a very good distro (not resource hungry with the Trinity DE)

I started with Mepis 6.5, and Mepis was always Old Faithful, the workhorse that always just worked. However, I've been exploring other distros and multi-booting since maybe 2008.

The exploration intensified from around 2012 due to Mepis12 beta (Warren's last release) not working on my then-PC, so I was looking for alternatives for when Mepis 11 was EOL. I got into SolydX and Manjaro XFCE because of that. And as I got better at setting up my PC to multiboot, share a data drive among the distros, and deal with custom grub configs, I realised it was not really an issue to have many distros.

When Mepis forum announced that MX14 was being developed, I was excited but by then, collecting other distros had become a fun thing. And I had grown to like Manjaro and generally the Arch ecosphere and usage of pacman.

Currently I have 14 (!!) installations on my main PC, but 3 are MX19 installs and 2 are MX21 installs (basically 1 each of XFCE and KDE; the 3rd MX19 is a XFCE install on which I also installed Plasma to test how both would work together). Of the remaining 9 installs I have:

- 2 Manjaros (XFCE and Budgie)
- Anarchy (Arch-based) (Gnome)
- Artix (Arch-based, but init = runit) (Plasma)
- Void (Cinnamon)

- KDE Neon (Plasma)
- Solus (Budgie)
- Fedora (Gnome)
- PCLinuxOS (MATE) (MATE has never captured my imagination, but I thought I should have it in my collection!)

The distros above are listed in descending order of my preferences.

To be honest, I can do without the distros after Void. If any of those 4 ever get borked in an upgrade (they are either rolling or have a clear upgrade path between releases), I don't think I would restore or reinstall them. I still keep them because they have continued to work and upgrade without issue for many years.

Why have so many? I'm just curious about different package management systems, desktop environments, distro families.


I don't mess as much with my laptops. I just pair MX with a rolling distro. My current laptop holds MX19 and Manjaro, while my old ASUS laptop holds MX19 and Solus, because Solus is a curated rolling distro that requires minimal maintenance. I can go close to a year without updating my old laptop (and I do!) and when I finally carry out the update on Solus, there are no issues. I wouldn't want to try that with an Arch-based distro.

Starting with Slackware in 1993 ? .. I dabbled with Linux and eventually found Mepis to be the best distro for me.

Since I have always run, developed on and supported a large user base of Windows, I found it VERY hard to move to Linux for my desktop, trying several times over the years and falling back to Windows with some linux use. ( I spend a lot of time in cmd and cli, and this is where I found linux to be amazing.)

Eventually, and traveling through Mint, PCLinuxOS, Manjaro and many many others, I landed on mint as ‘the one’. However, I found Mint to be more unstable than I care for, and tweaking and bending was just not something I care to do on my primary rigs which must be up.

I continued to search for a good, stable version that I could a) put on older machines and donate to schools and clubs, and b) run for a long time with no issues. (Billboards, digital signs, kiosks etc). And had pretty much given up on MY desktop using linux. I continued using Knoppix and AntiX for recovery and upgrading windows machines, and started using puppy linux for clients that couldn’t stay out of trouble ;-/

And then I found MXLinux … I started using it on computers I would donate, then recovery usb’s , and then started using it in a VM as a desktop. Since I run SO heavy on windows, it took me a long time to figure out how to do everything I needed on a daily basis. But I found MXL to be absolutely the best desktop.

I started converting me, and at the same time clients and friends and found most windows users, like myself, could get around in it easily and without a bunch of CLI tweaking. I have found MX to be far more stable than anything else I have run, and it is easily repaired, tweaked, and SO maneuverable that it is quite amazing.

For me, MXL is FAR FAR above the rest in many ways. I still support clients on Mint, Debian and a few other distro’s, but there is just nothing else that comes close in my opinion.

If MX Linux didn't exist, I would use Linux Mint Debian Edition, with Xfce on top.

Chris

I've used Red Hat before they went commercial, Mandrake/Mandriva, and then settled on Slackware before switching to MX Linux as a daily driver a few years ago. I am a package maintainer and kernel tester for Slackware, so I still have a machine with both 15.0 and Current running. I like it as Slackware has a more simpler package management philosophy. Besides, it's the oldest distro. I just don't like to spend the time these days customizing the applications and interfaces, so a distro like MX Linux that has all of that already, is a big win for me.

I used to liked the one-size-fits-all desktop distros, and I still recommend them to newcomers for "general use" computing (a little bit of just about everything). I guess I've become more of a "niche user" now since I don't use my 'puter for "a little bit of everything" anymore. I was a Xubuntu fanboy for years, and if they hadn't switched to snaps as the default package manager, I'd still have kept a copy. Did Linux Mint and Linux Lite and they were both superb for general use.

But I also love minimalism, wanting to clean every li'l bit of unnecessary software from an OS, but it rarely works out the way I need it to. I throw Xfce on top of antiX for my main daily driver. Yeah, I know I could just use MX instead, but having systemd without using it violates my obsessed need for as little extra as possible (except I just gotta have my Xfce desktop!).

I have been flirting with a sweet, fast, little-known Xfce distro based on Slackware, called Salix OS. It's "Linux for Lazy Slackers." It has a sweet little tool set and GUI stuff so I can avoid the dreaded and fearsome ▄︻デȶɛʀʍɨռǟʟ═══━一 and just happily point-and-click my way along. And so systemd!

Salix 15.0 RC3 is out now and likely to be the final product. It's kinda sorta like MX, but for Slackware instead of Debian.