MX Linux Forum

I'm dreaming the day to abandoned this IMac10. With only 512 Mb Vram and the horrible pentium core duo. Telling to myself "the sense you are doing is not" The only good thing about this machine is it's sound. And the AIO format.


What can I expect, if I choose to move to ryzen integrated, mv's, ssd's, ddr's ???

1. Compatibility (wifi is not needed in my case).

2. Driver ability

3. Capable of booting MX ? BIOS ?

4. The sense you are doing is not

5. Go ahead, upgrade now.

Thanks in advance.

Amiga-MX wrote: Fri Dec 01, 2023 4:48 pm I'm dreaming the day to abandoned this IMac10. With only 512 Mb Vram and the horrible pentium core duo. Telling to myself "the sense you are doing is not" The only good thing about this machine is it's sound. And the AIO format.


What can I expect, if I choose to move to ryzen integrated, mv's, ssd's, ddr's ???

1. Compatibility (wifi is not needed in my case).

2. Driver ability

3. Capable of booting MX ? BIOS ?

4. The sense you are doing is not

5. Go ahead, upgrade now.

Thanks in advance.

Hi, I have a Lenovo ideapad 3:
I have a Lenovo ideapad 3, and it runs great with MX-Linux AHS.

Thanks for sharing, can you confirm:

1. Compatibility. SSD, NVMe ?

Look at my signature. No problems at all.

Typically, brand new bleeding edge and exotic hardware is more likely to have the greatest issues with drivers, it's always been this way with Linux and all distributions are affected, not just MX.

The thing to keep in mind is keep to the brands known to have the best compatibility with Linux. Lenovo and HP Business models typically sit in the top tiers, both have their quirks any deviation from business class machines in general can see you entering the domain of the exotic builds. Essentially, the more basic the machine, the less chances of being exotic, therefore less chances of bugs. I've never had an issue with Asus Laptops, but I've never seen their batteries last much more than 18 months from new either. I've configured Dells with Linux, but Dells tend to be poles apart between one release and another. They are far too proprietary for my liking and every time I start to romance about a Dell, I'm reminded of why I never use them personally or professionally.

I have had no end of troubles with Nvidia graphics cards. Basically, Nvidia promised the earth in 2009-2012 for Linux, but their promises turned to gravel in our mouths and it continues in the same vane today. I've only personally had 1 laptop with Nvidia graphics, never again. Desktops are a different matter because the graphics card can usually be swapped out.

My daily driver is a Lenovo T560, a model promoted as a high quality business machine, hich at the time was nearly 2x the price of a similarly spec'd machine from other vendors. It is now 8 years old, but, it is a special CTO build, therefore it touches boundary of being in the exotic series, so it's always had issues with Power Management. This was not the machine I purchased, it was a warranty replacement for the T550 I purchased the year prior which, also being a CTO build, was discovered to have some nasty issues with the (then) graphics drivers in Linux. Thanks to Linux marching on and improving hardware support, this 8 year old machine works better today than it did when it was new. It still has a quirk or two, but nothing that is a show-stopper.

My Wife has an Acer Swift 53xx model and they're a terrible PITB to get Linux working on, but once working, it runs better than my Lenovo. Acer do some funky things with their BIOS, but being a Ryzen 5 3500U based machine, it runs MX Linux AHS fantastically.

My son has a mid-2104 21" iMac. It works fantastically in every way, but it needs a special trick to get Audio working from the speakers and once in a while, it starts up with the backlight turned down to minimum, so a torch can be required to illuminate the parts of the screen to illuminate the mouse cursor towards opening MX Tweak so I can get it back to normal.

I've just taken a jump and ordered my son a new Acer Travelmate for his schooling. It was on special at my supplier and $200 cheaper than the Lenovo I was going to get for him, but I chose it for the battery life. I have yet to see what challenges I'll face to get this one going with MX but there's no way I would allow him to suffer the train wreck that is Windows 11. Every Acer I have ever had to configure Linux onto has always worked flawlessly, but there was always one challenge to overcome. Acers don't achieve the same level of finesse Lenovo Business machines do, but they're great little workhorses when they're going right.

Disclaimer: these are some of my experiences and opinions based on what I recall through the last 18+ years of using Open Source on my daily drivers. Others will no doubt have had different experiences they can relate.

timkb4cq wrote: Fri Dec 01, 2023 7:58 pm Look at my signature. No problems at all.

I can consider your answer as 5. Go ahead, upgrade now. But I forget to tell you than I'm gonna build it by parts. Does it changes anything ?



@m_pav Right, I have an Acer laptop that went flawlessly on Trisquel over years, Intel graphics and pentium dual core, sound okay wiki okay. Very slow machine, like this iMac. It's a torture.

Intel Inside

core duo



Thank Mx'ers

I built mine from parts.

I recommend that you either have a discrete graphics card or get a motherboard that allows system to boot up with an AMD APU if that is what you choose.
Mine is my mobo has the feature that

Flash BIOS Button even works without a CPU, memory or graphics card installed!

m_pav wrote: Fri Dec 01, 2023 7:59 pm ...I've never had an issue with Asus Laptops, but I've never seen their batteries last much more than 18 months from new either.

I've had the same experience.

Actually, I've only ever used Asus and Acer on Linux and I've found the battery longevity on Acer to be far better.

I had long used Intel CPU equipped computers (both desktop and laptops) and had little issues with MX over the years. Recently, I switched to AMD and have found no real differences in day to day operations. With the Intel based systems, I did have NVidia and they also caused me no real concerns and now with an AMD GPU, there's been no issues either. If you can see your way clear to get a rig with discrete graphics, I think as was suggested by ghunter, that's a nice way to go. The only issue I have had with fresh installs of MX is the wifi connectivity but as can be found in other threads, that largely resides with the need to choose an optimal wifi dongle or card.

I just installed MX23/KDE on an AMD5500U-powered laptop and everything works, including the realtek wifi chip. For more recent APU's it is advised to use the AHS version of MX (Advanced Hardware Support). Once you will have chosen a motherboard and APU you can post here to check if someone is already using the exact same components but i wouldn't worry too much.

I've been using an AMD Ryzen (32Gb, R1606G Zen processor with 2 cores and 4 threads @ 2.6 GHz (up to 3.5 GHz)) based ATARI VCS mini PC/console since May, 2021 as my daily driver. That means 24/7, on MX with liquorix kernel.
Never ever had a glitch, malfunction, crash, freeze you name it! The system is running off of a periodically remastered, customized
USB pendrive. The only downside of my setup is the boringly uneventful operation, thanks due to the stability of MX linux and the integrity of the hardware. The system is used for internet browsing, multimedia and serves as a VPN gateway for the laptops and mobile phones at home. To sum it up, MX and Ryzen are a perfect match in my experience.

Thanks for all the responses. Past & Current. About what I expected, just wanted to hear it from others.
Other than Apple chips; Linux seems to run on everything?

Not sure Richard if MX can/will run on everything but I'd say from my experience a wide range of systems both Intel and AMD and from low (even by today's standards, very low) specifications to high end. I don't think you will have any real issues running a platform such that you've described. Hope you get it set up nicely.

At the moment, I had to give up building my own PC, I was about to buy the necessary components during the Black Friday I only lacked the box, which I could not find, this forced to start a new exhaustive product research, My surprise was that according to the comments, this box did not come equipped with the fans, which led me to another investigation, contributing an extra cost, nor the CPU came equipped with fan. Also, during these 2 weeks Firefox and Add blockers uses an attack, slowing down the YouTube videos, it has been terrible to investigate the Hardware options that I needed in these conditions. In such a way that just the last day of the Black Friday already at night, I had to decide whether to buy the components, and then the box, and the fans somewhere else, I decided not to do it at the end, I spent the date of the promotion, The next day the complete set had expected a slight price increase of about $50. I have also seen that you have to analyze the historical price of a product, to know the trend.


Apart from that I have been thinking that it is crazy to put another box of PC in my room, especially I do not want my computer to occupy space, I do not want it to have lights, and what the least I want is that it is another noisy box accumulating dust in the floor.

I use this iMac 10.1 that my brother was going to discard for that of the DRM macOS. Fortunately I have rescued it with MXFB, but with a hard Pentium core duo, it is not enough. From this iMac, I have learned the good of the AIO format. After investigating, I have seen that many PC AIO for sale are reconditioned, so this option deems. Nor do I want OEM incompatible with Linux.


A radical format option that I have seen, would be to use GPD Wind Max 2 Ryzen, which is shown on its website as compatible with Linux MX, the ideal would be to use the IMAC as an auxiliary monitor, since it has good speakers, also connect a Second LG monitor with DVI output, but this is the part that worries me the most, since I don't know the new video connectors.

That's an interesting journey you've described Amiga-MX.
If you are a fan of all in ones perhaps you might like to check out the small form products from such groups as Beelink and Intel NUC. The main drawback of such smaller systems would appear to be their comparative sparcity of ports and that may become a future issue depending on your computing needs.
This all said, when Intel NUC first came on the scene, I helped a friend with it and we put Linux Lite on it and it's worked for him ever since. The thing that struck me about the NUC then (and now really) is how such small format units can pack so much of a punch and they do lend credence to the saying "boxing above its weight".
As far as them being noisy I can only say they are very quiet in operation and certainly not dust catchers.