2022-06-14
I'm currently daily driving MX Linux. In Debian side of the world, in my experience, I have found MX Linux to be a fair alternative to Ubuntu. It is actually a really good distro, and I have some points to back my statement:
1- According to MX Linux's developers it's a user-oriented distribution. Which means it includes some non-free software in it by default in order to make this distro 'work out of the box' without giving the user much trouble. These non-free software may include fonts, media codecs, browsers etc. for example, in 'MX package package installer' user has the ability to download google-chrome/edge etc.
2- If you have only used Fedora and opensuse your entire life, you would find the installation time of MX Linux to be magical. I have found the MX Installer to be 3 times faster than Ubuntu's installer. MX use its custom installer which has enough options and is fast at the same time.
3- If you are one of those people who don't like the idea of systemd then you would feel at home to find that MX comes with there own init system by default. Which is, of course faster than systemd.
4- If you are one of those people who LIKE the idea of systemd then you would feel at home to find that MX linux has a systemd option which you can enable from MX Boot options or from the boot screen. It shows that MX is not just another 'I hate systemd distro', It is a user-oriented distro, if a user wants to run some applications which are only available under systemd then user has the ability to switch over to systemd without going full hacker mode. Apart from that I've found systemd on mX to work faster than on most distros. Boot time difference between Ubuntu and MX (systemd) is big.
5- Now comes MX tools. MX tools is like Yast on Debian. I like to do things on command line but after using MX tools I've found that sometimes GUI things can also save lot of time. For example, to block advertisement URLs I can manually go to github, copy all the URLs and add them to my host file. But hey, I can achieve the same with MX ad blocker tool with just few clicks! ad block is just one of them, with MX tools you can take system snapshot and can create your custom iso, can fix your boot problems, clean your system by deleting junk files, edit your bash config, install codes and even you can install Nvidia drivers!
6- You won't be told to RTFM everytime you ask for help on MX forum. Even the developers will come out to solve your problem as soon as possible. Now some Arch users may not like the idea of the outright help but see not everybody has time and willingness to RTFM everytime something breaks in their system. of-course you learn things by RTFM but if you work 12 hour shift 6 days a week then I don't think that reading the manual makes much sense.
7- MX Linus is a light weight distro. IT comes with xfce and kde, both are light on resources plus the boot time on MX are fast. It has for certainly given life to my crapy hardware. Even on their website it is said that MX was designed while keeping the old hardware in mind. And despite being lightweight MX comes with tons customization of options, even more than what you can find on some of the resource hog distros. On old or weak hardware MX is a must try.
These were some of the points why I consider MX Linux to be a really good disro. If you haven't then do give MX a try, don't just get off by the initial looks it's highly customizable.
This post was proudly written on vim running on MX Linux.