What distro do you favour? Beside MX/Antix of course...

[tek10]

I use MX Linux on my main desktop. My primary laptop runs SolydX for about 5 years now.

While I generally prefer xfce, there are a few apps that fall into the KDE realm that I really find useful and I have a secondary desktop system that has had Manjaro KDE running for better than 7 years, with no problems, that provides those apps. I've been thinking about using MX KDE instead of Manjaro but why mess with what works.

[handy]

PCLinuxOS (PCLOS). Due to the MX that was running on my Lenovo not being supported anymore, I had a bit of a look around via Distrowatch, & decided to give PCLOS a go. It uses Synaptic & associated packages that have been modified to handle .rpm packages. PCLOS uses a full rolling release package management system, which is certainly something I like, as I've used the Arch (pacman) based rollers, much more than any other type since early 2008.

PCLOS is very similar to MX. Its number of users are less. & the number of packages in its repos are also less than MX. Which is about the only negative thing I can say about it at this stage. If you put in a request for a package to be incorporated into the repos it will most likely be included.

My main machine (Clevo) is also out of MX support now. I expect I'll clone my Lenovo setup onto it & migrate. I've still got my Pi4 running on the MX spin. It is a really economical torrent client. Not much good as a data server though. They really are still just not powerful enough.

I'll continue testing on the Lenovo for a while yet before I make my decision to move on.

[mowest]

PCLinuxOS (PCLOS). Due to the MX that was running on my Lenovo not being supported anymore...My main machine (Clevo) is also out of MX support now.

Just curious, would installing MX21 on those machines be a possible solution as well, so you wouldn't be running an unsupported version of MX? I'm guessing you were using this "end of life" for your installed version of MX as an opportunity to see what else is out there since it would be best to do a clean install of MX21 on those machines anyway. Although, I love MX and have done two clean installs to move from MX19 to MX21 on two of my machines, there are lots of great distros out there. I have heard good things about PCLinuxOS and their community. A positive and supportive community are great reasons to run a distro.

[linexer2016]

PCLinuxOS (PCLOS). Due to the MX that was running on my Lenovo not being supported anymore...My main machine (Clevo) is also out of MX support now.

Just curious, would installing MX21 on those machines be a possible solution as well, so you wouldn't be running an unsupported version of MX? I'm guessing you were using this "end of life" for your installed version of MX as an opportunity to see what else is out there since it would be best to do a clean install of MX21 on those machines anyway. Although, I love MX and have done two clean installs to move from MX19 to MX21 on two of my machines, there are lots of great distros out there. I have heard good things about PCLinuxOS and their community. A positive and supportive community are great reasons to run a distro.

I concur with mowest's suggestion. Is there something embedded in your earlier versions of MX that can't easily enough be ported to MX21 handy? MX21 in my experience runs equally well on old hardware and newer. I am writing at the moment on an 16 year old PC that runs 3Gb of RAM and I can put this machine to most tasks I have for it. Maybe you need to do more elaborate computing but then I presume your Lenovo and Clevo machines are relatively modern and could handle all versions of MX?

[handy]

Thanks for your reply's.

I love Arch Linux. I left (in 2011) due to the disrespectful arguments (which I only observed & did not participate in) that went on between staff, mods, TU's & many others (some with huge post counts) re, Arch moving to systemd.

I found Manjaro in late 2011 & really liked it. It was a lot of fun back then with a small community & lots of enthusiasm. I did have to put up with systemd for sometime, until a chap came along & provided a systemd free alternative for Manjaro - which was welcomed by Philm & the other high flyers.

That systemd free dev left Manjaro & started Artix (with some others who were into providing Arch without systemd). I used Artix for a while but ended up drifting out of there (can't remember why?). I desired another systemd free distro. I looked at Devuan, didn't like it for some reason. Then discovered MX & antiX & liked them. Nearly the end of history lesson.

I used PCLOS >15 years ago, I liked it, but I moved on to discover Arch.

When I recently looked at PCLOS, I discovered that it was systemd free & full rolling release! I wonder why I hadn't looked at it after I left Artix? As they really are my prime desires. MX is close to that, but it is not a full roller.

When I set up my systems from scratch on a new distro, it takes quite a lot of time. Admittedly I can drag my config files with me. Even so, it still takes a lot of time. I don't much like doing it these days. I did once, not now. That is the prime reason I like full rolling release distros. I rarely need the latest versions of kernels or other packages. I just don't like going to all that work to build a customised system if there is a way to avoid it. :)

Rolling release or not:- Build it; then clone it; backup your most recent clones. If you have a hardware failure, you can very quickly recover by casting a cloned image onto the old drive, or a new one, or another machine (failure or not). I love it!

[shrinker09]

Since I've been using MX-Linux and antiX, those have been my favorite distros. I have one desktop that's still using Ubuntu (18.04) but I'm going to reformat it with MX when I have the time. At that point, I'll be using MX and antiX exclusively.

But my daughter doesn't like MX. Part of it may be the touchiness of the touchpad (I don't use a touchpad). She loves Mint. She's not at all technical, and Mint is painless for her. Then again, my husband isn't at all technical, either, and he's been using MX just as painlessly. But his is a desktop, so no touchpad.

[BV206]

A long time ago I tried MX 17 (I think) and had too many problems. Same thing with Debian Xfce. I don't remember what version that was. I only used MX as a Live USB after that and used Xubuntu as a daily driver for several years with few problems.

I installed Linux Mint 20 Xfce when it was released about 2 years ago. I was relatively happy with it. I had very few problems. Then last month when Linux Mint 21 was released I installed the Xfce version. I immediatley noticed high memory use. From a cold boot with nothing running it was using around 750 M. LM 20.3 with the same kernel and same Xfce version used about 450 M. I thought that was way too high for Xfce so I did a clean install of LM 21 Cinnamon. It used about 800 M and I had some video problems that I didn't have on Xfce.

Yesterday I decided to try MX Xfce again. I really like the "new" MX installer. Now I can create separate / and /home encrypted partitions and not use the whole disk. After I installed it I enabled the ahs repo, upgraded, and installed the 5.17 kernel. With the 5.17 kernel I no longer need the amdgpu tearfree option. I checked the memory usage between 5.10 and 5.17 and systemd and sysv and it varies from 518 M to 603 M. I can't tell if I have some problem or if Xfce is just a memory hog now.

I think I will stay with MX 21.1 for now.

[mowest]

Thanks for your reply's...

When I set up my systems from scratch on a new distro, it takes quite a lot of time. Admittedly I can drag my config files with me. Even so, it still takes a lot of time. I don't much like doing it these days. I did once, not now. That is the prime reason I like full rolling release distros. I rarely need the latest versions of kernels or other packages. I just don't like going to all that work to build a customised system if there is a way to avoid it. :)

Rolling release or not:- Build it; then clone it; backup your most recent clones. If you have a hardware failure, you can very quickly recover by casting a cloned image onto the old drive, or a new one, or another machine (failure or not). I love it!

@handy Now I understand. Yes, I can definitely see the appeal of a true rolling distro. As you said, install, set up once, clone images as part of your backup routine, and you always can do a restore of the OS in seconds on a new drive and it would be as if you never had a drive failure. Since I have grown to love the stability of MX, I decided that during the new install of MX21 I documented every little change that I made to my system, and continue to document those changes. When I did the second install of MX21 on a different system it went a lot faster, but I've been thinking about this. I already self host my dotfiles on a local git server, I'm thinking of looking into Ansible and creating an Ansible play book that makes all of those changes for me after a fresh install. Since for me most of my post install set up involves installing the programs that I use regularly and git cloning my dotefiles to the new install, it should be a rather quick process, but I need to learn Ansible first, which is on a list of Linux things that I want to learn, so I might not have that ready before the next release of MX

[Buck Fankers]

MX is my main, because of easy of use, tools such as MX Snapshot and just overall completeness. I just feel in love with MX.

But, there is this one old 32 bit game, that needs wine, the only one I play, that for the last two years or so, I could not get it working on MX. Game works on Endeavour, Manjaro, Linux Lite, Sparky... For this reason, I have separate computer, where I dual boot Endeavour and Linux Lite, so I have access to that game. If I could get game working on MX, I would not need to run any other Linux flavor. Too bad... Arch based rolling distro sometimes breaks game after system update (usually new version of wine), that is, why I'm running it on two different Linux distros. Maybe one day, I will be able to run only Linux MX

[handy]

@Buck Fankers, you could block Wine from being upgraded on Arch based (probably any) distro. /etc/pacman.conf (from memory, its been a while now... ).