A New Fanboy
Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2023 6:11 pm
From my blog:
This is MX-Linux, customized to my liking. It took all of ten minutes to get set up just the way I like it.
https://imgur.com/SOTFb9e.png
Transparent Xfce panel with wicked-kewl launchers and widgets (weather, analog clock, notifications), new icon set ("Gant"), and wallpaper.
It's gorgeous, fast, not encumbered by systemd (it's "there" as a dependency but not used, so none of that "taming" is needed and no huge logs being accumulated).
Partly on principle and partly out of personal preference: Firefox replaced with Chromium, Thunderbird replaced with Evolution, Conky script edited for something prettier as well as informative. Installation was efforless and very simple. I used to keep separate partitions for root, home, and swap, but in MX it's hardly necessary, since backup is so fast and simple, as well as elegant. Even configurations are easily copied for future upgrades and re-installs if and when needed. No need for Timeshift or Systemback (which I had to add to Linux Mint via a PPA to replace buggy Timeshift). So I gave MX-Linux the entire hard drive during installation.
Even without using systemd it boots in seconds to this beautiful desktop and needs a lot less CPU and RAM to do so, despite the "greater efficiency" promised by systemd. That so-called efficiency is a trade-off in my opinion. Disk space (which has to be manually limited by editing a configuration file) and logging on top of the"init" daemon that intrudes into EVERYTHING. Efficient? I respectfully disagree.
Also available in a 32-bit .iso, MX-Linux offers a Fluxbox edition which is fine for much more modest hardware. You can even get a non-PAE kernel for those really old 'puters, but I would use antiX Linux for anything 512-RAM or less, and choose applications that don't need a lot of RAM and processing power, like Seamonkey in place of Firefox and Thunderbird. Seamonkey does both jobs in one application with thousands fewer lines of code than Firefox all by itself, yet has all the wicked-kewl features of both including a WYSIWYG editor for composing fancy HTML emails like this one (I post to this blog via email).
Best of all, it's all built on the awesome granddaddy of a zillion and twelve other Linux distributions, Debian! Debian Stable, to be exact. Except for maybe Slackware, it just doesn't get any more stable than Debian Stable. Yet in MX, all the software can be found fully up-to-date using either Debian backports, MX's own repositories, and/or Flatpaks. This is no longer vulnerable to all that Ubuntu cruft, corruption, regression, and weirdness. Even the noblest of Ubuntu-based distros are vulnerable to the weirdness Ubuntu is sending downstream. I saw it in the Mint Forums where people are moving to Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) to avoid it now. It seems only a matter of time before Linux Mint's own flagship may switch to a Debian base from Ubuntu, as the latter gets stranger and more complicated and harder to manage.
Oh, okay, yeah: Why do I have two clocks? Because when I have an application running, the Conky hides behind it but the panel (with the other clock) doesn't. I can still glance over and keep track of time. As much as I dislike duplication, I have a reason for doing it here. Aaaaaand, I have one digital and one analog. Because, that's why. It's Linux and I can do whatever I want! Try that in any other OS!
The newest MX-Linux fanboy,
Robin
This is MX-Linux, customized to my liking. It took all of ten minutes to get set up just the way I like it.
https://imgur.com/SOTFb9e.png
Transparent Xfce panel with wicked-kewl launchers and widgets (weather, analog clock, notifications), new icon set ("Gant"), and wallpaper.
It's gorgeous, fast, not encumbered by systemd (it's "there" as a dependency but not used, so none of that "taming" is needed and no huge logs being accumulated).
Partly on principle and partly out of personal preference: Firefox replaced with Chromium, Thunderbird replaced with Evolution, Conky script edited for something prettier as well as informative. Installation was efforless and very simple. I used to keep separate partitions for root, home, and swap, but in MX it's hardly necessary, since backup is so fast and simple, as well as elegant. Even configurations are easily copied for future upgrades and re-installs if and when needed. No need for Timeshift or Systemback (which I had to add to Linux Mint via a PPA to replace buggy Timeshift). So I gave MX-Linux the entire hard drive during installation.
Even without using systemd it boots in seconds to this beautiful desktop and needs a lot less CPU and RAM to do so, despite the "greater efficiency" promised by systemd. That so-called efficiency is a trade-off in my opinion. Disk space (which has to be manually limited by editing a configuration file) and logging on top of the"init" daemon that intrudes into EVERYTHING. Efficient? I respectfully disagree.
Also available in a 32-bit .iso, MX-Linux offers a Fluxbox edition which is fine for much more modest hardware. You can even get a non-PAE kernel for those really old 'puters, but I would use antiX Linux for anything 512-RAM or less, and choose applications that don't need a lot of RAM and processing power, like Seamonkey in place of Firefox and Thunderbird. Seamonkey does both jobs in one application with thousands fewer lines of code than Firefox all by itself, yet has all the wicked-kewl features of both including a WYSIWYG editor for composing fancy HTML emails like this one (I post to this blog via email).
Best of all, it's all built on the awesome granddaddy of a zillion and twelve other Linux distributions, Debian! Debian Stable, to be exact. Except for maybe Slackware, it just doesn't get any more stable than Debian Stable. Yet in MX, all the software can be found fully up-to-date using either Debian backports, MX's own repositories, and/or Flatpaks. This is no longer vulnerable to all that Ubuntu cruft, corruption, regression, and weirdness. Even the noblest of Ubuntu-based distros are vulnerable to the weirdness Ubuntu is sending downstream. I saw it in the Mint Forums where people are moving to Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) to avoid it now. It seems only a matter of time before Linux Mint's own flagship may switch to a Debian base from Ubuntu, as the latter gets stranger and more complicated and harder to manage.
Oh, okay, yeah: Why do I have two clocks? Because when I have an application running, the Conky hides behind it but the panel (with the other clock) doesn't. I can still glance over and keep track of time. As much as I dislike duplication, I have a reason for doing it here. Aaaaaand, I have one digital and one analog. Because, that's why. It's Linux and I can do whatever I want! Try that in any other OS!
The newest MX-Linux fanboy,
Robin
