MX Linux Forum

This article was picked up by our new mastodon site (t/h) and is now on our Reviews page:

http://www.datamation.com/open-source/l ... r-you.html

Great article about my two favorite distros.

Very helpful!

Brief story.

A friend of mine had a Windows 8 laptop and it was giving her problems such as CPU overheating and loss of wifi connection. I suggested she tried Linux and forwarded her on to another friend who built and serviced PCs. I suggested he tried MX Linux on the laptop, but he's familiar with Linux Mint, so he put that onto it. Let's just say it didn't go too well, the CPU was still overheating, she was still losing wifi, and other problems also emerged. She was ready to consign her laptop to the bin.

I told her I'd create a live version of MX Linux on a USB stick so that she could give it a try. I gave her the USB stick a couple of days ago and asked her to give MX Linux a good workout. She phoned earlier and told me it was a revelation - everything worked perfectly after hours of use. Methinks MX Linux has saved her buying a new laptop.

Mint or MX?

Silly question.

Being considered an equal with Mint (for some value of equal) is a feather in MX's cap.

No kidding, right?

Yes it is. Puff your chest out a bit. You and the entire team have earned it.

One of these days I'm going to take a stab at making MX Xfce my default workaday OS on my desktop computer. (It's there already with my laptops.) If I can't do that to my satisfaction, Mint KDE is my fallback.

I have used Mint KDE for years and like it. However the Mint team has decide to no longer support KDE in future versions of Mint. So I went to using Mint XFCE instead. I have grown to really like XFCE but not so much with Mint. The next LTS of Ubuntu will have spyware once again although they said it could be disabled on installation. For me Conical has gotten way to close to Microsoft for my comfort so I looked for an alternative. Another thing is the Mint team would not respond to users question about the spyware. That turned me away from future versions of Mint. Many people think it's a good thing but I didn't move to Linux only to end up with a Microsoft Linux Window system. One of the Debian distros I tried was MX and I was greatly impressed with it. It is now on my laptop and as soon as my new system comes in, I will be installing it on it. I have highly recommended MX to my Linux friends and will be installing it on their systems soon. Besides the great MX team this forum has the best people I have seen.

I still have a nicely-running Mint 17 Cinnamon (upgraded all the way to 17.3), which will be supported until 2019.

I installed both Mint 17 and MX14 on my new PC in early 2015. MX14 was the first MX release and was already a competent, fast and low-resource distro, but it was really not refined aesthetics-wise. I LOL'ed at Dolphin Oracle's comments about MX14 in one of his youtube videos because they are so true. It was very rough around the edges and MX tools was still veryearly in its development.

At that point, Mint 17 (the last Mint without systemd) was so much more polished, Cinnamon was excellent, and it really worked well. Still does, in fact.

But since 2015, MX has progressed in leaps and bounds. The packaging team keeps software fresh without the need for 3rd party PPAs. When you talk about a turnkey distro, nothing comes close to MX now (Virtualbox guest additions, permanent mounting of VB shared folders! Compiz, etc - all the stuff in MXPI Popular Apps tab).

I haven't seen anything in Mint 18 (I have a trial install in VB install) to make me want to upgrade my Mint 17 to the new version.

I don't boot as often into Mint 17 now. I still like it and it is comfortable for Linux newcomers to use, but once support ends, Mint 17 will be gone and won't be replaced by a newer version of Mint.

Mint Xfce has been my 'go to' distro for several years and I'm still a Mint fan. As a previous poster said I too am becoming increasingly concerned about Ubuntu, beginning with the time they stuck Amazon into their search by default. Their info gathering in the next release is troubling as well. For me Mint has always been "the good Ubuntu".
MX has become so polished in this latest release and so easy to install that it has fast become my favorite distro.
You guys have done an amazing job with MX.