MX Linux Forum

I have been trying out different Linux distros by using Oracle VirtualBox. I am doing so to hopefully increase my Linux knowledge and consider installing Linux on a pc either as a dual boot system with Windows or possibly replace Windows all together. So far, out of all of the Debian based distros out there, I really like the MX Linux implementation of the xfce destop. I like the distro as a whole as well. However, I am still kind of torn between it and TrueOS (FreeBSD), which is not Linux. However, there are also some things I like about Manjaro Linux. Manjaro has a large community, but your community is pretty large as well. Out of the three OS, I am leaning more towards MX Linux.

I want to congratulate your team on a job well done.

Manjaro has a large community, but your community is pretty large as well.

There are pluses and minuses, I would say that for a smaller community the advantage is that you can have an influence.

Good point Adrian. Thank you.

What about package management in this distribution? Is it as easy as in MX?

Wow! That is a pretty strong statement. What all don't you like about it? Just curious. I appreciate your opinion.

I am a inexperienced Linux user. The statement I made about different distros was mainly a first impression.

Thanks.

Actually, that user knows very well that the Forum has a rule against trashing other operating systems, and I am about to delete his post for that reason.

Thank you Jerry3904. There are so many Linux distros out there and a lot of them are good, so that makes it difficult for me to choose one.

I wish I would have known about VirtualBox earlier. It definitely makes things easier and safer to try out different operating systems.

chiguy1256 wrote:Thank you Jerry3904. There are so many Linux distros out there and a lot of them are good, so that makes it difficult for me to choose one.

I wish I would have known about VirtualBox earlier. It definitely makes things easier and safer to try out different operating systems.

And LiveUSB's which most distros support.

My first disto was SUSE in 1998 and I choose Arch Linux in 2002. Arch taught me the inner side of Linux, learning to maintain an edge-cutting distro (rolling-release). Excellent Linux learning disto. Once you knew the things, you want a more "stable" distro. Tried Manjaro which is good but still a rolling-release distro. Also I tried Debian 6 but the packages were too old....."too stable". :) . Netrunner with configurable (stable or testing) Debian 8, gave a new direction how Debian can become interesting. Unfortunately the development got delayed with Debian 9 and this brought me to MX Linux. What MX attracted me was not just Debian 9 but 9.3.... "edge-cutting stable". And MX own packages and tools are great. This is first time, I am not "worried" when upgrading packages what MX does every day. Thanks to the MX developers.

Re: 9.3, e.g. ".3".
I got the distinct impression from several Debian based distros that came out right after 9 was released (Sparky 4.6, Voyager 9, ParrotOS 3.9, SolydX) that Debian 9.0 and even 9.1 were buggy as hell. So, somewhat like Ubuntu 16.04.0, Debian needed 3 point releases to BECOME reasonably stable and bug-free. Rather than "cutting-edge"!

Forgot to mention, my criteria are boot speed, responsiveness, minimal pre-installed and availability of packages, semi-stable, and beauty. Linux Mint and Ubuntu don't fulfil all.... boot speed is long and responsiveness is not sharp with Xfce. But they are excellent for Linux beginners. Hope this helps to choose a distro.

rasat, does MX Linux use rolling release or does it use LTS? Thanks.

MX is based on Debian Stable so therefore it's fixed release and not rolling. "LTS" is generally used by Ubuntu-based distros, not Debian, so MX is not LTS in name either. But there is a volunteer group giving LTS support to extend the life of Debian Stable releases after their official life of 2+1 years.

Read this:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases
https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

And the official word: Users Manual Section 1.4

chiguy1256, if you haven't discovered it already, Distrowatch is an excellent hub for the mind-blowing variety of distros available.
And Jessie has reviewed lots of them including Antix and MX.

https://distrowatch.com/

chiguy1256, if you are asking "why Xfce", its the lightweight and be tailored as per your liking. Runs GNOME and KDE applications.

Example, I like the GNOME overview feature (Xfdashboard), KDE file-manger Dolphin to tag my files / folders, clean desk with icons in side menu, and task bar and workspace at the top. With MX Tweak you can make beautiful window frames and effects.

Here is screen of my desk:
http://www.openmarga.net/screen/mx/rasat-screen.jpg

and Xfdashboard:
http://www.openmarga.net/screen/mx/rasat-overview.jpg

Thank you all for the advice and links.

rasat wrote:chiguy1256, if you are asking "why Xfce", its the lightweight and be tailored as per your liking. Runs GNOME and KDE applications.

Example, I like the GNOME overview feature (Xfdashboard), KDE file-manger Dolphin to tag my files / folders, clean desk with icons in side menu, and task bar and workspace at the top. With MX Tweak you can make beautiful window frames and effects.

Here is screen of my desk:
http://www.openmarga.net/screen/mx/rasat-screen.jpg

and Xfdashboard:
http://www.openmarga.net/screen/mx/rasat-overview.jpg

Where did you get xfdashboard and Dolphin? From MX Linux 17? Does Dolphin integrate well (theming, file copy, dialogs)? For some reason my experience is that KDE apps integrate worse than pure QT apps like VLC and Qbittorrent.

Dolphin is available in the repos. You would need to install other packages to get full functionality. I installed KDE from the MX Package Installer and you get a functional dolphin. It can be themed if you also install systemsettings which is the KDE System Setting app. I then run it in xfce. Why install KDE, I like to fool with it on occasion.

As richb said, Dolphin is in the repos. I have no problem with Dolphin in Xfce except some dialog boxes don't appear which I don't mind. So far, Dolphin seems to be the only file manager with tag system. When you have hundreds of documents, its handy to find them.

xfdashboard is also in the repos.

My initial problem with xfdashboard and MX17 was that I like to trigger it using a hotcorner in the top left of the screen, just like the windows overview in Gnome 3.

However, the xfce Hotcorner panel-plugin had not been maintained for some time and was no longer working in MX17 (still works for MX15/16). So in MX17, apart from triggering xfdashboard with keyboard shortcuts*, I also installed Brightside (also in the repos) to get the hotcorner functionality. But Brightside's reaction time to activate xfdashboard after you hit the hotcorner is super slow.

In the end I reverted to an old hotcorner solution, which I use in another (non-bunsenlabs) distro: bunsenlab's bl-hotcorner script.

I set out the procedure in the MX Wiki: https://mxlinux.org/wiki/applications/hotcorner

I also have the right bottom corner set up to trigger the 'show desktop/minimise all windows' command.


* @rasat, I note from your screenshots that you use a launcher in the top left corner to launch xfdashboard. I can't believe I didn't think of that as a compromise!

Regarding the original post, there are pros and cons to choosing a fixed release distro like MX vs a rolling distro like the one that was previously criticised in this thread. I use both these distros.

MX Pros:
1. stable, quick and reliable Debian Stable distro with great tools;
2. One-click updates from MX-Updater that you don't really need to worry about. No need to check on any update announcements or advisories before installing updates for fear that an update might break something.
3. Packaging Team really does a great job giving us packages that are not found in standard Debian repos or which are updated beyond the versions found in Debian.

MX Cons:
1. there does come a point at which updates of certain packages can no longer be repackaged for MX as they depend on a higher version of certain key platforms on which that Debian Stable branch is based.
2. Eventual need for reinstallation. Fixed releases like Debian/Ubuntu based distros have a base of key platforms/packages that don't change, and everything else for that version is built on these platforms. Every 2+ years, a new release with the latest base is released. Eventually you have to reinstall to get the latest base, because at some point in time, newer versions of some of your applications may no longer be installable on the older base since they will be built to depend on the newer base. Even if you don't care or need newer versions of programs, you should upgrade once they no longer provide security updates for your version of Debian.

I will state that I don't find the reinstallation every 2+ years that difficult. You can preserve the /home partition of your current MX install when installing the new version of MX over the /root partition. And besides, backing up your data isn't so hard if you already store most of your data and media in a separate partition or drive rather than in /home of your distro. That way, the installation process doesn't affect the main place that you store your data.


Rolling distro pros:
1. rolling distros upgrade everything, even the key platforms the rest of the distro gets built on, all the time. If your favourite package has some new feature coming that you really want, you'll get it soon enough.

In Debian, you may have a scenario where you are looking forward to a long awaited feature or a bugfix for an annoying (but not serious/dangerous) bug in an application, then you find that the new version of the app with the new feature or fix can't be built to work on your version of Debian.

2. no need to reinstall the distro as it just keeps rolling on.


Cons:
1. in return for the above benefits, you will generally need to give the distro more care and reading up before installing updates/upgrades. Since everything is being upgraded, even foundations, updates can sometimes be a little tumultuous. Some rolling distros are easier to manage than others, because the developers try to control and moderate some changes before releasing the updates to the users. Some just throw all updates into the repos and the user has to do all the work.

The one you mention is not difficult as long as you don't jump straight into updating when you are notified of any. Wait 2 days then read the update announcement forum thread to see if some known issues have cropped up and what the solution is. Then update, incorporating the solutions if needed. Most of the time nothing's going to go wrong even if you don't read the announcements first. But once a while an update will come along that bites you in the butt, and knowing Murphy's Law, it'll be the one for which you didn't do your homework.

2. you may also need to carry out some regular maintenance on certain config files.

During updating, some config files may have updates but your existing .conf file will not be written over. Instead, the new version is saved with a different suffix. I ignore most of these changes, but there are one or two config files where I do take notice of new versions. Some changes might need to be merged into the current config file. But I do it at my leisure, maybe once every few months.

Conclusion:
You have tradeoffs in time and convenience, depending which you choose.

richb wrote:Dolphin is available in the repos. You would need to install other packages to get full functionality. I installed KDE from the MX Package Installer and you get a functional dolphin. It can be themed if you also install systemsettings which is the KDE System Setting app. I then run it in xfce. Why install KDE, I like to fool with it on occasion.

Yeah with KDE you have to go all in because everything is so integrated. I'll give MX-17 a try when the time is right. Dolphin is nice but I don't know if I want to install the KDE/Plasma DE. Sometimes KDE can mess with GTK DEs (theming). I had Dolphin themed in XFCE in both MX Linux (KDE version) and PCLinuxOS, but there were just enough quirks that I decided that KDE apps in a GTK DE isn't really worth it. I was hoping to find a Dolphin AppImage (LibreOffice as AppImage works great), but not much was available. So for now I give up Dolphin, thanks anyway.

rasat wrote: xfdashboard is also in the repos.

Nice. I didn't know this existed for XFCE so thanks for posting images.

As as I said earlier, I have been trying out a lot of Linux distros lately. The majority of the ones I like are Debian based. There are a few independents and other distros that have some features that I like, but it always seems like I turn back to MX Linux and its smaller cousin AntiX. Most of the Debian based distros I like, either default using the xfce desktop or have that as a choice. I would have to say, that by far the MX Linux implementation of xfce is the best.

One thing I need to ask and I hope I don't have any rotten tomatoes thrown at me is why don't some of the Debian based distros try to use YaST? Just curious. I find that this is the one feature I do like about openSUSE.

I appreciate the feedback.

As I said in the beginning of this discussion, I've been trying out various Linux distros. It seems for the most part I tend to be attracted toward Debian based distros. I also like distros that have their own implementation of the xfce desktop. I also tried Fedora, Manjaro, Solus, openSUSE, Gecko Linux, and OpenMandriva. Of these non-Debian based distros I just listed, the one thing I do like about openSUSE and Gecko Linux is the YaST control center. I was wondering why don't other non-SUSE based distos have YaST. I did some Googling and found that there was a project called YaST4Debian, but it has basically been put on hold. Does anyone know if YaST4Debian is going to move forward? Thanks.

I'm not qualified to answer your question, because I know next to nothing about Linux packaging. I don't think there is anything YaST can do that can't be done with with apt. In Debian/Ubuntu we have Synaptic and many tools developed around apt and deb packages. MX Linux is a perfect example of that. Instead of asking why YaST is not part of Debian/Ubuntu, maybe it's better if you describe what you miss in Debian/Ubuntu that YaST can accomplish. I tried openSUSE many years ago and yes its installer was very capable and the YaST tools are good. However I feel YaST is/was developed with enterprise in mind, not the home user. Overall the package quality is lower in openSUSE than Debian/Ubuntu so that made me leave openSUSE.

Coming from a SUSE background, YaST was a big thing.... rpm package. Later when comparing with other package management, rpm didn't have the flexibility what others have. In other words, YaST is limited.... easy to use but....