After many years with Ubuntu - impressed by MX
Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2022 2:56 am
Hi everyone,
I've been using Ubuntu as my main distribution for more than 10 years with XFCE as the DE. My Dell laptop, officially supported for Ubuntu 18.04, provided a less than optimal experience with GNOME, for example, but was perfectly usable with XFCE. For the more recent versions of software, not packed with 18.04, such as Libreoffice and Thunderbird, I was using flatpaks and FlatSeal to give them more rights, especially for accessing the file system outside their sandbox. Using flatpaks was fine but irritating for minor reasons, such as the inability to directly open attachments from Thunderbird. So, I decided to try some alternatives, with Ubuntu 20.04 the most obvious one.
First, I tried OpenSUSE because I had a good experience with their rolling version, Tumbleweed, for one of our laboratory computers for which the graphic card was not well supported by Ubuntu. I did not use the rolling version because it needs constant surveillance and updates and settled to test the latest Leap version. Well, the live USB session did not start on my laptop, so it stopped there. Next, I tried the same with Fedora 35 with the same, bad, result. Tested Ubuntu 20.04, which worked well, but then, as I had some time, looked for other distributions with a recent version and found the MX-21. This is not the first time I was trying a Debian-based distribution and, for a few weeks, I have been using Debian itself, before going back to Ubuntu. Linux mint has a side-project based on Debian, but I was curious about something different. The fact that MX-21 was recently released and that it is using XFCE as its main DE were in favour of testing it.
These are only first impressions, but wow, using the live MX-21 was extremely smooth, with remarkably nice default options. After testing the live distribution, I backed up my data and installed MX-21 on my laptop. So far so good, almost everything seems to be working well, with one exception that I did not yet investigate (reading from an NTFS formatted external drive was slow, or writing to the SSD, I have yet to see which is the problem). Otherwise, a very smooth experience overall. Even my handheld scanner, a Brother model, worked well once the debian package from the manufacturer was installed. I appreciated all the MX-specific programs which allow for example, even for a novice, to have a Conky widget customized and working. So, overall, an extremely positive first impression. I will update this post later, when MX-21 will have been used for a few days and weeks. I hope to keep using it for some time. Many thanks for the developers and thank you also for the documentation. And a happy new year!
I've been using Ubuntu as my main distribution for more than 10 years with XFCE as the DE. My Dell laptop, officially supported for Ubuntu 18.04, provided a less than optimal experience with GNOME, for example, but was perfectly usable with XFCE. For the more recent versions of software, not packed with 18.04, such as Libreoffice and Thunderbird, I was using flatpaks and FlatSeal to give them more rights, especially for accessing the file system outside their sandbox. Using flatpaks was fine but irritating for minor reasons, such as the inability to directly open attachments from Thunderbird. So, I decided to try some alternatives, with Ubuntu 20.04 the most obvious one.
First, I tried OpenSUSE because I had a good experience with their rolling version, Tumbleweed, for one of our laboratory computers for which the graphic card was not well supported by Ubuntu. I did not use the rolling version because it needs constant surveillance and updates and settled to test the latest Leap version. Well, the live USB session did not start on my laptop, so it stopped there. Next, I tried the same with Fedora 35 with the same, bad, result. Tested Ubuntu 20.04, which worked well, but then, as I had some time, looked for other distributions with a recent version and found the MX-21. This is not the first time I was trying a Debian-based distribution and, for a few weeks, I have been using Debian itself, before going back to Ubuntu. Linux mint has a side-project based on Debian, but I was curious about something different. The fact that MX-21 was recently released and that it is using XFCE as its main DE were in favour of testing it.
These are only first impressions, but wow, using the live MX-21 was extremely smooth, with remarkably nice default options. After testing the live distribution, I backed up my data and installed MX-21 on my laptop. So far so good, almost everything seems to be working well, with one exception that I did not yet investigate (reading from an NTFS formatted external drive was slow, or writing to the SSD, I have yet to see which is the problem). Otherwise, a very smooth experience overall. Even my handheld scanner, a Brother model, worked well once the debian package from the manufacturer was installed. I appreciated all the MX-specific programs which allow for example, even for a novice, to have a Conky widget customized and working. So, overall, an extremely positive first impression. I will update this post later, when MX-21 will have been used for a few days and weeks. I hope to keep using it for some time. Many thanks for the developers and thank you also for the documentation. And a happy new year!
