MX Linux Forum

Posted: **Fri Jul 10, 2020 9:01 am**

TL;DR - No, the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence. At best, it's just a different shade of green. But, more commonly, MX continues to be the pasture wherein I wish to continue to graze.

I've been an MX user since Jan 2019 and am very happy with the OS. But, I'm always wondering if the grass might not be "greener on the other side of the fence". So, just for grins, I took a look around using DistroWatch to give me an idea of the most "popular" distros. And, yes, I'm aware, it's all about click count over there and not so much popularity but it's a good place to start. Each of the distros I sampled have strengths, but all are missing something when compared to MX Linux.

I have a scrap 320GB disk laying around and decided to have a bit of play:

Code: Select all

Model: Jmicron Corp. (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdf: 320GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: pmbr_boot

Now, I want to emphasize that this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, anything approximating a review of any OS. It is, rather, more of a quick survey of the landscape.

This, then, is the disk with the various distributions installed:

Code: Select all

sdf            298.1G 
├─sdf1           512M boot
├─sdf2  swap      16G 
├─sdf3  ext4      20G Linux Mint
├─sdf4  ext4      20G Fedora
├─sdf5  ext4      20G LMDE4
├─sdf6  ext4      20G Sparky LQT
├─sdf7  ext4      20G Devuan
├─sdf8  ext4      20G SolydX
├─sdf9  ext4      20G SolydxK
├─sdf10 ext4      20G 
├─sdf11 btrfs     20G openSuse
├─sdf12 ext4      20G 
├─sdf13 ext4      20G 
├─sdf14 ext4      15G 
├─sdf15 ext4      15G 
├─sdf16 ext4      15G 
└─sdf17 ext4    16.6G

Here are my thoughts on the above, such as they are:

Linux Mint - too close to Ubuntu for my liking. They do a good (very good) job of removing the commercial aspects of Ubuntu, but ... And, it seem a little (very little) laggy when compared to MX and a couple of the others.
Fedora - Of all the times I've installed Fedora over the years (probably tried 5 or 6 times), I've never gotten it to install and run without issue. This latest attempt was the best of these attempts, but there was still something that just felt "off".
LMDE4 - I've always like LMDE, it's the flavor of Debian upon which I "cut my teeth". And, to be fair, it's a really good offering - very stable, light, quick, etc. But, it's missing some of the golden goodness found in MX and it's always got the stigma of being the red-headed step-child in the LM universe. It just doesn't get the love it deserves.
Sparky - I created the label and it should have been LXQT, but I mis-typed and I'm too lazy to go back and fix it. Didn't feel the joy and, I may have not delved into it far enough to become completely comfortable with it, but I couldn't find/install some of the tools I like (i.e., gparted, among others).
Devuan - This is, in my opinion, still a work in process. They have a good foundation going and it's completely stable enough, but the tools and toys are still not on par with what is available in MX.
SolydX/K - It was to this distribution I moved when I "fell out of love" with LMDE. This was back in the days when they were tracking Debian Testing and the community was active, interested, friendly, and really working the product. Make no mistake, they are still active, interested, and friendly but the development team is not what it was in the beginning and they are no longer working that almost impossible task of tracking Testing. They migrated to Debian Stable - just like most other Debian derivatives. And, they are stable. If MX were to, for some reason, be discontinued, it is to Soldyd that I would move.
openSuse - This is the "Leap" version, their stable release. And, WOW - this is a really HUGE product. Because I know most of what I need to know about the others, it is this one that I might keep after I blow away the rest - just for exploration, experience, and learning. When compared to Debian, they do many things in a different manner and, to my mind, that's exciting.

BTW - in case anyone is interested, they all run.

BTW2 - I discovered that with more partitions on the disk, all disk operations take longer. And, it's not a linear function.

Posted: **Fri Jul 10, 2020 9:19 am**

That's interesting; thanks.

Another option for trying lots of distros is to have them all on one USB stick.

http://multibootusb.org/

works well with many distros for this.

Chris

Posted: **Fri Jul 10, 2020 12:13 pm**

Usually I stomp around in the grass 1st before I live there. SolidX was fun to stomp around in.
Anything with LXDE I usually made with AntiX core as it's base.I was underwhelmed using LXDE < just druthers >
Fedora? The rawhide repos kicked my keister.
Open Suse? Was my 1st linux boot up. Did not last long. PBKAC. < probem between keyboard AND COMPUTER >
Sparky? Never tried it.

What ever tool fits my beefy hand best. That is the tool for me. Name branding does not enter into it.
I imagine I am not the only one who rolls like this.

Posted: **Fri Jul 10, 2020 4:10 pm**

I also look around once in awhile. I am definitely most comfortable in antiX and MX. But I also like Q4OS and Debian and openSUSE.

Here's a post I made a while back about my experience installing some other distros beside MX on an old ThinkCentre box I picked up cheap at the local surplus.

viewtopic.php?f=25&t=56009&p=557990&hilit=Nicer#p557990

Seaken64

Posted: **Fri Jul 10, 2020 4:24 pm**

My two cents , (And I agree 100% srq2625 !) Mint is the only one I have kept installs on (14 still left).

Manjaro - loved it, struggled with multiple machines, each one had a different issue and was tough on install to boot . Also lost various things on updates!

Elementary - Nope, just never liked it

Zorin - Felt amateurish and continued issues with various installations.

Puppy - Loved it, but sadly far too much never worked right, or couldnt get installed.

Redhat - Ran good, but no love for what was happening. Seemed like i was always fighting with it.

Gentoo - Never could get all apps I wanted up and running.

Knoppix - Probably close to my next favorite, but struggled with getting development working on it.

A few more in there, many *quite* good in some areas ... The ONLY flavor I have *ever* been 100% happy with was Mepis . When Mepis closed down I ran it until I could no longer justify it and then moved Mint. When I found MX ... I found my way home .

Forgot to say ... I have been "playing" with linux since around 1994 or 1995, deep diving in every year or so to test the waters... approx 2005 i found Mepis and ran it and a linux box ever since.

Posted: **Fri Jul 10, 2020 6:06 pm**

I like these distros and use these distros on different desktops.

SparkyLinux Xfce and LXQT

Antix Linux and MX Linux

LMDE 4 Debbie

Ubuntu LTS 18.04 / 20.04

Lubuntu LTS 20.04

LXDE Linux 18.04

I'm still learning about openSUSE Leap 15.2 and it works good and has a learning curve although does have great documentation and I have patience.

I tried Arch Linux and I did get it installed however I didn't want to spend the rest of my life trying to get it working.

I'm confused enough with the distros I use why add more confusion I'm no Linux guru and don't want to become a Linux burnout.

Posted: **Wed Jul 15, 2020 8:25 am**

Just a quick follow-up ... just in case there's any interest.

TL;DR -- It was a fun experiment but MX rules!

I decided to do a full-up install of the openSuse KDE on both my desktop and laptop (it's nice to have extra HDD laying around) and do some ad-hoc performance testing (comparing against MX Linux); basically run some programs and keep an eye on CPU load (via gnome-system-monitor) and temps (via "sensors"). As you can see - all very, very scientific!

So I processed a couple of RAW images to JPG (using darktable) and watched a video (youtube on google chrome).

Desktop (see specs in my signature), didn't notice ANY real difference in either CPU load or temperatures. But my desktop has a MASSIVE heat sink and fan (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C9FLSLY).

My laptop is another matter. Everything was looking pretty good and about the same as the MX Linux install. Then I started up the youtube video. Where my temperatures were running 55°C to about 60°C with MX and no fan running, with openSuse they started at about 60°C and spiked up to about 65°C. The fan was running just about all the time and in "high gear" (my fan seems to have four speeds: off, low, med, high). So, something is going on there!

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 11:16 am**

Zorin - Felt amateurish and continued issues with various installations.

Paid or free version? I consider the free version a flim flam come on. For the paid version
So to keep their hinky adverts. on point.
Easy to use. Like Windows.
Seems the free version is a bare minimum and a clueless former windows user gets upset with the sentence above.

There are some linux distros I am biased against. Just being honest.

Zorin questions on a public linux forum get ignored by me. Usually.
Because they advertise paid support.
I figure if you like Zorin. Pay for it. Still cheaper with full support iso. VS other aid operating systems with online paid support.

Since their come on is geared toward Windows Users. :lipsrsealed:

Back to your normal programming. Don't mind me.

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 11:46 am**

srq2625 wrote: Wed Jul 15, 2020 8:25 am Just a quick follow-up ... just in case there's any interest.

TL;DR -- It was a fun experiment but MX rules!

I decided to do a full-up install of the openSuse KDE on both my desktop and laptop (it's nice to have extra HDD laying around) and do some ad-hoc performance testing (comparing against MX Linux); basically run some programs and keep an eye on CPU load (via gnome-system-monitor) and temps (via "sensors"). As you can see - all very, very scientific!

So I processed a couple of RAW images to JPG (using darktable) and watched a video (youtube on google chrome).

Desktop (see specs in my signature), didn't notice ANY real difference in either CPU load or temperatures. But my desktop has a MASSIVE heat sink and fan (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C9FLSLY).

My laptop is another matter. Everything was looking pretty good and about the same as the MX Linux install. Then I started up the youtube video. Where my temperatures were running 55°C to about 60°C with MX and no fan running, with openSuse they started at about 60°C and spiked up to about 65°C. The fan was running just about all the time and in "high gear" (my fan seems to have four speeds: off, low, med, high). So, something is going on there!

This is interesting, I haven't used Leap but did use various versions of suse for about 20 years. I've had very good experience in recent years with their rolling release version, Tumbleweed. If you want to keep trying suse I'd recommend moving to Tumbleweed, which is where most of the opensuse development resources go. But it is a heavy distro and does demand a lot of memory and may cause heavier CPU usage. Once I found MX, I haven't gone back to suse. But the help forum is top notch.

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 2:00 pm**

I'm presently back here with MX because I have a slight problem with a recently purchased pre used monitor, it appears to be stuck in XGA, instead of being SXGA, AntiX won't drive it at the higher resolution for some unknown reason, a download of Slackware live XFCE set it up OK whilst running live, (but no installer), so I tried MX, it comes up as XGA, but I can reset it to SXGA to use, but it just keeps on reverting to XGA when re booted, (& yes, I have tried saving the configuration); it's a puzzle, but liveable with, for now.

My other distros - AntiX, of course, (my main distro of choice), & some lightweight versions of Slack get an airing now & again; plus Tiny Core & SliTaz, always on standby, if I need something small to run on an old machine. I've tried to like Devuan, but it just doesn't seem to hold me.

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 2:13 pm**

If you look at distros from an application point of view -- what do you want it to do -- they're much harder to evaluate.
For example, if I want to run VMWare virtualization products, MX is not the best choice. And it doesn't claim to be, either.
If you want to build a tablet that only runs Chrome in kiosk mode, there might be superior distros out there. Same if you're looking for a NAS or Plex video server.

Ironically, I cobbled together a travel router for the purpose of sharing paid WiFi networks that I'm frequently on in hotels, campuses, etc. It's just a simple Intel compute stick glued to a mini 4 port gb switch and a battery pack.
I tried several firewall and router distros. Nothing impressed me for this setup. I ended up choosing.... MX 19. Best router I've ever owned. Who knew?

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 2:50 pm**

MX as a distro is wonderful, but one of the greatest benefits of MX is the strong connection between the community and the distro. New tools, new features, and even new desktops seem to come from community ideas and experimentation. As MX continues to welcome new users into the community and mentors those new users in "scratching their own itch" you will continue to see things that make MX stand apart from other distros.

One look at my signature shows that I run a few different distros, but what keeps distros on my machines is the community. I installed MX for the first time on my hardware this July, but it will make it well beyond a month thanks to a great community of users, contributors, and developers.

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 2:53 pm**

clicktician wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 2:13 pm If you look at distros from an application point of view -- what do you want it to do -- they're much harder to evaluate.

Very true, it’s hard to compare a Desktop centric OS to a purpose built one.
Really hard to beat MX in the desktop realm, which is what I think the OP was focusing this thread on.

My favorite “on the go” wifi router/ access point, VPN concentrator distro is OpenWRT hands down. Runs great on a Raspeberry Pi.

Virtualization Hypervisor - Proxmox VE

NAS/SAN - OpenMediaVault

Firewall/Router - pfSense or OPNsense, maybe Sophos UTM and Untangle (those aren’t that good and limited)

Network Security Monitoring - Security Onion, Rock NSM, OSSIM

Imaging/Cloning - Clonzilla, FOG

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 3:16 pm**

andyprough wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 11:46 am This is interesting, I haven't used Leap but did use various versions of suse for about 20 years. I've had very good experience in recent years with their rolling release version, Tumbleweed. If you want to keep trying suse I'd recommend moving to Tumbleweed, which is where most of the opensuse development resources go. But it is a heavy distro and does demand a lot of memory and may cause heavier CPU usage. Once I found MX, I haven't gone back to suse. But the help forum is top notch.

I tried both Leap and Tumbleweed ... or at least I tried to try Tumbleweed. I couldn't get it to run properly and wasn't interested enough to invest a lot of effort.

Then the MX KDE betas made the scene and that as a game changer for me. I've been running the Beta 2 since it was made available and haven't looked back! Can't wait for the actual release to make it's way to the public.

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 3:37 pm**

Hi everyone,

Still pretty new here but I have to say the grass is very green!

I have distributed my own specialty-purpose Linux (AV Linux) since 2007 and my first Distro and first meet-up with Linux folks was Mepis in 2006, At the time I thought what an extraordinarily, friendly community-minded place but my needs were to move my Studio recording setup to Linux and for all it's great attributes Mepis was not a multimedia-centred Distro at the time..

So after lone-wolfing it for many years with pure Debian and various 3rd party installers (Remastersys, Systemback) I now find myself back here at MX all these years later mostly because MX is SO much more than a 'Desktop Linux'. It is extremely developer-friendly and the developers have left their fingerprints all over it with the numerous excellent MX Tools, the supplementary Packaging is nothing short of incredible as a complement to what Debian already provides and the willingness of the packaging team to scratch the Users itch regardless of of how popular the resulting package may be is beyond generous. The richness of the MX Repositories really makes MX adaptable to pretty much any purpose so I think MX is vastly more versatile than pretty much any other garden variety Desktop Linux. There are without a doubt many great ones with high points and notable attributes but it would be a tall order indeed to come up with as complete a universe as MX provides and still maintain that friendly community touch!

I'm loving the grass here and plan on pitching a tent here for some time to come! Thanks to all!

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 4:04 pm**

srq2625 wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 3:16 pm I tried both Leap and Tumbleweed ... or at least I tried to try Tumbleweed. I couldn't get it to run properly and wasn't interested enough to invest a lot of effort.

I've used openSuse Leap 15.1 and 15.2 although to much for me to want to learn at my old age and there are to many other choices to use that I'm more familiar with so I can relate to your frustration.

openSuse Leap 15.2 is a good distro and worked well OOTB however everything I needed to do I had to research and spend too much time to trying to figure out how to do stuff properly.

Just ain't worth the hassle, I'm an install and use OOTB type user.

I'll stick with MX Linux and PCLinuxOS for my daily drivers although I'll still play with other Linux distros.

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 6:39 pm**

SwampRabbit wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 2:53 pm My favorite “on the go” wifi router/ access point, VPN concentrator distro is OpenWRT hands down. Runs great on a Raspeberry Pi.

Don't you love OpenWRT? I just bought a Linksys WRT3200ACM last week -- because it was the best router I could find that ran OpenWRT. They have really worked hard on that distro since the LEDE merge.

I agree that the OP was certainly referring to desktops. But, I'm kinda sensitive to this because Jesse at Distrowatch sometimes approaches every distro review like a general purpose desktop.
Do you think we're cultish about it? Make Tech Easier just wrote in a review of XFCE:
"MX Linux is a less common distro with a solid cult following"

Hahaha.
https://www.maketecheasier.com/xfce-review/

Solid cult, baby.

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 7:17 pm**

@ rokytnji.1 Free version... while I know its kind of dicey.. if I cannot get a community version up and really enjoy it... no possible way I am headed for a paid one ;-/ (just my own thing prob.. but .. )

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 7:22 pm**

DDWRT and OpenWRT had me for years, I couldnt leave them ... then I found pfSense and that was it. Couple a pfsense router with a Ubiquiti ap and NOW we have something serious, stable, and secure.

Plant an couple of MX machines behind it and you have heaven !!!

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:41 pm**

clicktician wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 6:39 pm Don't you love OpenWRT?

For basic at home use and on the go setups for sure, it’s not too much and not too little, and easy to use. I once had a RPi running it... acting as a Man-In-The-Middle AP to another AP, connecting multiple machines (wired and wireless) behind it through a VPN over DNS to avoid a Captive Portal.

clicktician wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 6:39 pm Make Tech Easier just wrote in a review of XFCE:
"MX Linux is a less common distro with a solid cult following"

I actually read that the other day.
Much better to have a solid following of any kind than a giant flimsy one. But I’m not a fan of kool-aid myself and I wouldn’t consider it cultish by any means.

CharlesV wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 7:22 pm DDWRT and OpenWRT had me for years, I couldnt leave them ... then I found pfSense and that was it. Couple a pfsense router with a Ubiquiti ap and NOW we have something serious, stable, and secure.

We were talking about something a normal everyday user would use at home. pfSense as much as I love it (note - I referenced it above) is not that at all, it’s overkill and a really learn to set up and maintain in a home environment. Most home users that set it up at home don’t do it right to begin with which makes it less secure than a box store router/firewall.

As far as Ubiquiti, them and I have a love hate relationship. I have A LOT of their products. Their APs, while good, really aren’t any better than anything else on the market for the home sector. You can’t take full advantage of them unless you have a USG. The USGs are overpriced bricks with a horrible setup and capabilities.

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 9:14 pm**

srq2625 wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 3:16 pmThen the MX KDE betas made the scene and that as a game changer for me. I've been running the Beta 2 since it was made available and haven't looked back! Can't wait for the actual release to make it's way to the public.

Same here. With the KDE version, I think I'm going to be able to come back home.

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 9:37 pm**

Manjaro=update and pray.
You never know when your system will break and timeshift does nothing, it takes you bak, but when you re update....... full circle
LM 20 seems interesting but it is laggy even with modern software.
Count your blessings we have MX, and hopefully soon MX KDE!

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 10:27 pm**

@SwampRabbit

I'll give ya the pfsense, but have to disagree with you on Ubiquiti. I have them in around 30 locations, including Hotels, many offices and lots of homes and unless we want to start talking Cisco (which I have other issues with), Ubiquiti rocks. Asus, Netgear, dlink, buffalo, Linksys - OpenWRT, DDWRT and Tomato ... had them, run them, replaced them and the BEST thing you can do ( imo ) is to run the Ubiquiti Ap's - DONT run the controllers or any other 'management' piece (except pfSense), just set the aps up and let them run. By far the best solution I have found.

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 11:23 pm**

CharlesV wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 10:27 pm @SwampRabbit

I'll give ya the pfsense, but have to disagree with you on Ubiquiti. I have them in around 30 locations, including Hotels, many offices and lots of homes and unless we want to start talking Cisco (which I have other issues with), Ubiquiti rocks. Asus, Netgear, dlink, buffalo, Linksys - OpenWRT, DDWRT and Tomato ... had them, run them, replaced them and the BEST thing you can do ( imo ) is to run the Ubiquiti Ap's - DONT run the controllers or any other 'management' piece (except pfSense), just set the aps up and let them run. By far the best solution I have found.

At the cost (hundreds of dollars to build a pfsense box and buy an AP) for the performance you get and the time (hundreds of hours) it takes to set all that up... a typical everyday home user is far better off with just a high end box wifi router.

$150 store router vs $100-150 AP + $200-250 pfsense box... yeah its a no brainer for a single everyday home user that needs to get 5-10 devices connected and be done.

And that user is perfectly secure for the majority of things they need to worry about because their ISP is probably monitoring and blocking more than a pfsense box would if they even got that far in the set up.

We're not talking advanced user or professional here. Heck most of those people don't create whitelist outbound firewall rules in pfsense properly, don't lock down the LAN or WAN to devices, don't segregate types of traffic (no 3 VLANs and ACLs isn't enough), and don't tune Snort or Suricata properly to catch what they need to catch. MANY a time I've seen the hugest reverse tunnels siphoning out home and corporate data (lets not talk about hotels... they get hacked more than honeypots do) just because they bought the latest shiny box with the most lights or used the most advanced software they could use but didn't configure it right because the person doing it did it from YouTube videos.

Just like in this discussion we talked about of different Linuxes OSes for different things, same goes for the network side too, use the most effective (time and cost) tool you need to get the job done.

I won't ever tell a typical every day home user to bother with pfsense, Ubiquiti APs, or anything like that unless I complete and utterly hate them and want them to waste time and money and maybe a bit of sanity.

We'll just have to agree to disagree

Posted: **Tue Jul 28, 2020 12:17 am**

SwampRabbit wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:41 pm
Much better to have a solid following of any kind than a giant flimsy one. But I’m not a fan of kool-aid myself and I wouldn’t consider it cultish by any means.

If it were a cult we'd all be shunned for even suggesting we look at other distros! Toe the line or else!

Seaken64

Posted: **Tue Jul 28, 2020 11:23 am**

@SwampRabbit
I get your points, truly I do. An normally I have to agree that most home users never *need* that. Yet, replacing that $150 router / wifi three or four times over the course of several years begins to tell the tale imo .

Different views of a different solution.. always welcome and always pertinent to the issues, location and people.

MX Linux Forum

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