 It has been quite some time since I've taken a look at MX Linux. I remember when I did that I kind of enjoyed it and at the time I was surprised because I was not very familiar with MX Linux. All I knew is that somehow they made it to the top of the distro watch rankings and as we all know those are the most perfect rankings in the world and they are never gamed. So we knew that MX Linux just had to be the most popular Linux distribution ever made. So I went into that review back when I did it, very skeptical because I figured that they somehow gamed the system and the distro was probably trash but it ended up being actually really good. MX had a lot of really cool unique tools that they themselves have created to make their distribution kind of awesome. But like I said it's been a while since I've gone through and taken a look at it. So with the release of MX Linux 21 I thought I would go through and install this thing again and see if it's still as good as I remember it being. Now I probably won't go through and show every single application that is installed on this thing. My plan is to go over some of the new features and also kind of reacquaint myself with some of the custom tools that I remember being there. So let's go ahead and install this thing and see what's new. So here we have MX Linux 21 wildflower in a VM and we have this welcome screen. Now I'm going to try to find the display settings here so we can see if we can get it to be full screen. And we'll choose 1920 by 1080 and apply and there we go and we'll keep this configuration good. And then we can close that. Now what we'll do is go into the VM thing here and go full screen. I'm sure there's a key binding for that but I'm not actually using virtual box right now so I'm learning something new. Anyway so what we're going to go ahead and do is install MX Linux and we have their custom installer here. The keyboard settings is fine here. We have the terms of use which is this is exactly what you want to see in a terms of use. This is literally like what seven lines long I mean that's awesome for terms of use. I mean I even I would read that and I'm the laziest person in the world. So let's go ahead and hit next here. Now this part here is supposedly new. I don't remember from before what this looked like so I couldn't tell you what the differences are but the partition manager for the installer apparently has been revamped and I've never seen one that looks like this before so it gives you the disk that you want to use and then you can go through and do this little slider thing that's actually kind of cool that's not something that I've ever seen before you can also do the encrypt option here that would encrypt the whole disk and then you can also do a custom partition setup. So we'll go ahead and use the whole disk and do next and then yes and it's already going to start the process here and we want to go ahead and leave these settings all the same that's going to affect grub and do next and then we'll enter our credentials here and this can be MXVM and then if I remember correctly you have to have a domain here in order for you to continue. Yeah so we'll just we'll just keep it example.com I think it was but it doesn't matter let's leave that and we'll leave that as work group as well. Okay and then this is fine this is also fine I really like this drop down menu they don't waste their time on a stupid map that nobody should use I think I remember saying this a precise thing before geared Linux distributions don't use the map just give us a drop down menu I know that they have the tech most installers have the text box at the bottom where you can search for your city or region or whatever and that's fine but here I don't even have to type anything I just it's just a drop down I mean maybe this isn't as good as a search box you could argue either way but at least it's not a map you know the map is stupid because it's you can't click in the appropriate places and half the time I click Michigan which is where I'm at and it gives me New York I don't know if most Linux distributions know this but New York and Michigan aren't the same state really they're not even that close together they mean they look close together but I mean there's a few lakes in between you'd have to swim really far in order to get there otherwise you're going to go all the way around all right uh that's a great rant anyways we can leave the time setting that is there uh as they are okay now we're going to use you know do a username so Matt is good we will do our very strong and complicated password and we'll leave the route unchecked I believe that will give us uh pseudo access for our main user I hope it will anyways I wonder if you all right if you want the default user access to have no password leave its password empty this will allow the user to log in without requiring password obviously should only be done okay so doesn't say default the root user is similar to the administrator user in some other operating systems you should not use the root user as your daily user account please enter the name for the new default user account for the basis if needed you can add another user okay so it doesn't say if we leave this blank I'm going to go ahead and just enter a password here just in case with the default debbie and install which mxlinux is based on debbie and with the default debbie and installer if you leave the root account or password you know field blank that gives the default user root access it puts it in the pseudiverse file I'm assuming that the same thing would happen here but I don't want to change chance it because I don't want to have to go to edit the damn pseudiverse file uh if I go to try to install something or do that not do an update you know so I'm just going to do that this way and then we can just go ahead and hit next and then we're just waiting for it to finish updating now this is not the prettiest installer I've ever seen okay it's fairly blah in terms of looks and it has a lot of text and a lot of things that you'd have to read if you want to you know get instructions if you're the type of person who reads instructions that is a thing that you can do but what I love about it I absolutely love that while I was doing all that stuff with the user account it was installing and the only other installer I know that does that is the ubiquity installer and I don't even know if it still does it I honestly can't remember but there at least with the ubuntu installer you used to after you selected the partitions and stuff it would start installing while you were doing the the user stuff and putting in your credentials the fact that this is already done I don't have to cut the video to wait for this to install it was installing while I was bitching about New York and Michigan being the same state uh so that is awesome so what I'm going to go ahead and do here is uncheck this and close this and then I will go through and just actually you want to know what I'm in I'm not in virtual box I'm in vert manager so it's possible that I could just go ahead and restart this and it would go ahead and restart right into the installed hard drive so I'm going to go ahead and just do that with virtual box which is what I'm used to sometimes you have to remove the installation media oops I guess I am shutting down okay it doesn't matter we'll restart it and then enter to continue which did do okay and then here we are I did it shut down apparently it's still going to go ahead and restart which is fine yes we're waiting for it to start up here and here we go we'll enter our password and then we'll go ahead and before we do anything else we'll go into the displays again and reset the display resolution oops that's one thing that's always bothered me the the menu should be here up there at the top I think because I'm always going to hit that power button but that's easily change okay so we're going to go here and 1920 by 1080 and apply and keep and close okay now and we'll go back here and hit the full screen I guess that I'm sure there's a key binding for vert manager I just have not learned them yet all right so we have the mx welcome application that shows up here now apparently there's a new tour here somewhere so we're going to actually click on the tour and we're going to take the tour first that's an interesting map okay using a new operating system for the first time can seem challenging and scary that's definitely true if you use a genome-based distra damn bird mx tour is designed to introduce and orient you to many of the features and graphical tools of mx linux xfce edition each of the so mx comes with xfce kde and fluxbox now this is the xfce edition they apparently have made a tour specifically for each desktop environment so that's really cool each of the topic areas have been separated into tabs from far less you can navigate these tabs by clicking on them or using up and down arrow keys on your keyboard so optimizing this for people who are used to using keyboards that's also cool so we're going to go ahead and go down here where this is the panel all basic stuff just showing you what the stuff is you've probably noticed that the default desktop of mx linux has a single vertical panel on the left side of the screen i did know that i'm not going to go ahead and read all the stuff but uh basically that just tells you everything that's in the panel this goes through the whisker menu which is one of the best desktop environment menus out there although the new kde one is really nice i should have chosen the kde version of this but i decided to go with xfce for whatever reason i think it's just because it was at the top which is always the best reason okay so the the task bar is going to go through and show you the open applications and this here shows you how to are these actually no that's an image okay um let's see here conky conky is just the time and this shows you the conky manager which is nice because usually when you when you manage a conky you do it through a config file having a GUI for that is going to be really good for people who aren't interested in dealing with config files okay so moving on to mx tools these are all the mx tools things that they've included uh and most of this is going to be in the settings app we'll look at those later mx welcome which is basically what we just clicked on mx tweak which is mx tweak brings together many small but often used customization organized under different tabs so this will allow you to change the panel theme compositor display config options and other basically that's just taking a lot of settings out of the xfc settings application and putting them into one kind of a one-stop shop place and we'll get that again in a minute install apps the mx package installer often revered to as mxpi allows you to search for install and remove packages and applications quickly safely and easily it consists of tabs to help you install so they're big on tabs if you if you haven't noticed that um so this is their custom like app center similar to like what manjaro does with the with pamac but obviously this is going to be matching to the debian repositories instead of like the the arch repositories and manjaro repository so updating the mx updater sits in the notification area of the panel the icon turns green when updates are available usually green means like clear i would think right maybe that's not the a great color for for it but whatever um the icon turns green under when updates are available and notifications will also alert you the updates exist left clicking the icon opens a window showing available updates right clicking on the icon brings up a menu with many options such as view and update view and upgrade check or up for updates and preferences mx snapshot allows you to create a bootable usb file of your currently running mx installation that is brilliant that is really cool uh i'm sure that this is a tool that existed i feel like this is a tool that existed somewhere else but the fact that you can go through and just create your own theming and stuff i get and put all your stuff and applications on it and then do this and you just permanently have that like a bootable drive to that installation that is really cool uh i mean that feature alone makes mx linux completely worth it if it actually really works well uh timeshift is basically allowing you to take snapshots that you've made and then restore them it's a backup tool i don't know whether or not this is using something like butterfs or if it's doing something else if it's just doing the normal timeshift stuff without butterfs but either way timeshift is a great tool a system info and then get help so that is the tour now uh it's i mean that is kind of spectacular it because this is aimed at new users that is very in-depth and not but my only criticism of this whole thing is that the tour thing is the last icon on the bottom this that was so good it should be at the top they should move the frequently asked questions down here and put the tour up here at the top because this is probably where most people are going to look first they may miss this and that'd be a crying shame because that tour was really good it was very very in-depth and for new users that's really good okay so we're gonna the the rest of this stuff is wiki tools user manual tweaks which we'll look at here in a minute the forums and videos and how you can contribute so that is it for this we'll just go ahead and click this so it oh yeah there's another thing that i like by default the show this dialogue is start startup it's unchecked almost every other distribution has that checked by default so win for mx linux okay now i feel like i've commented on that before the fact that it's still that way is really awesome okay so let's go ahead and deal with this panel because this panel is is probably my least favorite thing that i've seen so far when you have icons right next to a another icon up here at the top you assume that this is a menu but it's not a menu it's your power off button either these should be down here and the task bar should be up there or something else your menu should be next to the task manager which is what this is that's really weird so what we're gonna do is type in we're gonna go to that tweak tool and see if that's where your current panel settings have been backed up in a hidden folder called dot restore in your home directory uh mx linux guys use the word directory it's not a folder okay anyways we're gonna go here the panel we're gonna first display at the bottom and then we can hit oh i should get it hit just apply oh we can it's right here there we go good now you see when we moved it to the bottom the icons went into the proper place like they're no longer over here you know that's the way it should be i mean i mean i can understand wanting the panel along the the side a lot of people do that i'm okay with that i could even live with it over there you know you want it to be there but the layout of the widgets or the modules or whatever they call an xfc panel are they called applets or is that cinnamon i can't remember it doesn't matter uh but anyways the default layout of the panel is dumb that needs to change it's the first thing i would change and obviously it is the first thing i changed okay so let's look at this wallpaper for a second that's cool wallpaper we're going to keep that we'll look at the other little wallpapers here in a minute that was a that was a me uh oh something shiny anyway so we'll move to the theme here okay so this is basically so in like xfce settings i wonder if we can see the settings manager right here this is xfc settings panel right and you get appearance and this would just this these are basically the same thing okay so it is a little bit of a duplication of effort kind of thing but i think that they this one stop shop of all things awesome is awesome uh but anyways we can go some of that it does have a lot of themes pre-installed which is a win for me so this let's turn let's go ahead and go dark because so this is what the mx dark theme looks like and you have a couple different variations of it thick border dark thick border which gives you this weird blue border which is looks a little uneven to me looks thicker at the bottom than it is at the top you can just do dark we'll just leave it there um that's for the window manager it also has arc dark at a weighta which um you should never use arc arc dark arc darker arc light black bird which looks like this but that's calling me wrong if that doesn't look like grub box uh let's see here's the emacs oh wow that looks exactly like emacs by default the emacs theme is is not good i'd installed that yesterday yeah okay so this is gray bird that's not a bad looking theme gray bird emacs high contrast which comes with pretty much every link distribution matcha a few different i wouldn't be surprised if matcha is a fork of new mix because those look like the new mix colors to me but anyways let's see here oh and there's see look new there is new mix and that looks exactly the same it's all just a little bit different maybe a little bit more brown uh emacs comfort which is i believe the default and emacs comfort dark so we'll just leave that there um basically you just have the same options for window manager and then we have the icon so by default it looks like it's the they have a custom fork of papyrus which is a fine icon set you also have new mix here at a weighta which again you should never use because those things are ugly in my opinion you got eep pyrus tango uh those are skeuomorphic okay um now and we have the regular what the hell is a gnomicon that didn't change anything at all so we're just going to go back up here to this one here interestingly enough the icons didn't change live you probably had to close them in order for that to happen um wow interestingly enough like i said the icons didn't change so we're going to go back here we'll change them here there we go that's better and then uh this one here it's fine okay cool probably would probably just a restart issue we could probably restart it and get to the other one to change it anyways so that was the tweak tool for the icons which i you know closed so we can go open back up again all right the compositor so this will allow you to do um change compositors so you have a choice between xf window manager which is the default for xfce and Compton uh so if you're more interested in Compton it'd be interesting to see that's probably probably what they're being using there is pycom because i don't think Compton itself is actually still being developed uh we got some display tweaks for just scaling and such so that you can work better with high-density displays that is pretty cool i don't have a high density display so i can't test that out uh some config uh random configuration options enable desktop zoom reset tune our custom right click actions uh enable single click on desktop that's the way it should be single click is the best for sure it should be default everywhere you can tell i started out in katie because katie you know as a linux user katie at least used to be i don't know if it's the default now but it used to be single click was default and that's the way i learned how to use linux and i got attached to it and i was in for a nasty surprise when i stopped using katie because everywhere else it's double click right so that's the first thing i change every time i install a graphical file manager is to change that to single click behavior the fact that this is single click by default more bien right okay so the other thing is reset like dm enable mounting of internal drives by non root users okay that's actually really cool because if you have if you have two hard drives but you're not having them either connected by grubber or some other way all the time you have to enter a root password in order to get into the other drive and while i can understand that the problem becomes that some graphical file managers specifically things like nautilus i think nautilus doesn't do this right but there's a couple others some of them won't even let you connect to them at all because they won't they won't bring up polkit in order to actually you know let you enter the password to enter into those things this option here is actually really cool okay so that is the tweak tool i'm going to go through the menu here real quick all applications about mx length accessibility adblock adsl advanced network configuration also makes your appearance the interesting thing about xfc is they always break out their settings panels as separate applications so we have archive manager asunder cd ripper bash okay i remember this from the last time i looked at at mx they have a GUI application to manage your bash config i can hear the terminal people out there who are very attached to their bash configs screaming because this is just a weird thing to even exist because that's not the way i mean i've never seen any other distribution include a graphical way of managing your bash rc that's what this is you can add aliases in a graphical uh in a graphical way you can change your prompt you get a few extra prompts at least one other prompt you can create your own prompt right from there that is and you have some others you can choose your history length and you can you can actually add things to the path right here from the GUI okay uh i i don't know whether or not to be disgusted by that or seriously impressed every single time i see this like i remember being completely surprised by this last time as well that is cool also weird um okay so let's scroll back down back to past this we have bluetooth manager brightness system play bulk rename which is part of tunar catfish file search charoot rescue scan in order to true into a different linux system clementine for the music application uh a cli apt base package manager what is this so this is okay so this is like a script that runs apt like apt get an apt update or apt update apt upgrade we'll go ahead and do an update here why not there shouldn't be too many things how this is this release was just yesterday uh apt update yes so there apparently was a few apt update now yes but it just keeps going around in circles so there apparently was nothing okay you should probably it appears that at least one list file is missing so what i wonder what the purpose of this is if it doesn't actually you know work let's go ahead just curiously and search for terminal see what terminals we have on here so we have xfce terminal that looks like that's it that's good uh you a lot of distros go through and put like four terminals uh there's okay so we just sudo apt update and and sudo apt upgrade okay and then do yes so looks like there's only one update there to be done okay so that's done all right anyways but actually while we're there does control t bring up a terminal it does awesome uh as it should most most uh debbie and naboon 2 base distros should have that because it just feels like it's default not for me obviously i'd want to do super enter but that's because i'm tiling window manager guy so the next thing is uh let's see here if i do free dash m we'll do so to look for some memories we're using about 638 now we do have some other things running thunar is there in the background so if we close that we could probably let's go ahead and close that and run it again yeah that actually went up okay anyways let's do a uname dash a and we're using the 5.10 kernel so this is a little bit behind but again this is debbie and stable so you're going to be expect to be a little bit behind you know for a long time until because this is not the unstable version where you'll get updates let's see if neo fetch is installed it is installed by default so we're again this is the 5.10 kernel this is bash using bash 5.1.4 which i believe is also a little bit behind this is xfc 4.16 which is the most recent version of xfc if i remember correctly xfc is actually the perfect desktop environment for debbie and stable because neither one of them are going to change very much you're not you're never going to have to worry about a brand new version of xfc showing up with a lot of extra changes because that never happens um all right so this shows all of the things we are using this is xfc terminal they're using liberation mono for the font and i'm going to tell you right now that that right there is not the processor that i'm using okay i'm assuming that has something to do with the virtual machine okay so there is that stuff that we normally go through let's go back to the applications we're not going to i don't even really remember where we were oh this one here cli apt based package manager clipboard manager color profiles conky manager which will again manage the concrete which is cool we can we can change the theme but it only comes with one theme it'd be cool if i had more than one theme but you could obviously add some and save your own and this adds a added a system panel information stuff over here that's cool and uh we can literally go through this i mean obviously some of these are in conflict that's cool that that exists uh you can also preview it it's not much of a preview though that's weird that must be maybe it's a little broken oh no that that's there that worked but only only gives you a preview if you click on it maybe they're just not a preview of that one oh yeah there we go let's use that one it doesn't really none of these really show up all that great uh on uh this wallpaper let's go ahead and choose from the other ones again where it's over the side okay anyways that's the conky manager that's really cool uh again usually you'd have to do that in a configuration file so the fact that there's a GUI is really good for new users probably why that that bash rc thing exists as well even though it's still uh weird uh disk users analyzer we're only in the d's here people there's a lot of files here or a lot of applications firewall configuration i'm not we're moving fast now gw is here genie is here uh let's see the genome dial-up tool what the okay uh i didn't even know that still existed g-parted is here uh see g-thumb something forget gtk hash that's not get met you learn how to read htop is here by default we'll look at that here in a minute probably uh job scheduler that's going to be a front end for like crony or something probably for cron tabs or for cron jobs i mean uh see the keyboard settings last last paint that's going to be like a microsoft paint i believe a clone we got liberate office here by default uh let's see your light dm uh lucky backup i wonder why you need lucky backup and timeshift i'm gonna know how those two things play well together uh that's a game mail reader uh midnight commander here is here um interesting choice i would um not you don't see a lot of distributions with mc installed anymore going back down here uh let's see here mx conky what's the difference between the okay so they have two different conky configuration uh things but this one here just get this is the other one allows you to change the the configuration file this one allows you to change the location of the stuff so if we alt and left click we can actually move that that's awesome that's really cool um and we can that means we can move this as well over here where we can actually maybe see it a little bit better okay that is cool i'm not exactly sure why those two things aren't combined they probably should be combined uh then you don't have two different separate two separate ones um okay so going back down here i'm sure i'm missing a lot of stuff it doesn't matter nvidia's taller's notes pdf stuff peggy which is uh i believe a game print settings pulse audio um let's see your task manager dunar time shift transmission for uh p2p stuff the torrents and such vlcs here installed that's gonna be your default video editor and then xfc terminal so okay xf burn which i'm still astonished that gets included on almost every distribution okay so those are the applications we've looked at the we've looked at the startup performance and stuff like that and such uh this is going to be probably the esr version of firefox i believe if we go to help and then about uh this is version 93 this is not actually the esr version i would have thought that they would use the esr version because this is debbie and stable usually that has the esr version maybe i'm wrong about that but that's the most recent version of firefox uh we can close that tab okay um anyways so that is mx linux we looked at some of the the tools uh if we go here to open up firefox and then we search for mx linux and look for the mx linux actually what we can do is just click on this we have the homepage right here so we can look at the some of the the new stuff that we didn't actually look at there's a new ufi live system boot menus so but i wasn't able to show you this because obviously this is a virtual machine that doesn't use ufi but the ufi boot menus will look different we have updated versions of xfce plasma and fluxbox uh if you're interested in a fluxbox tour again you can leave a comment in the comment section below and maybe i'll take a look at one of those we looked at the mx tour the user password for admin tasks by default uh i believe that just means you have to enter a password when you do stuff i think i don't know why that wasn't wasn't default before uh mx default mx comfort default theming which is what we were looking at before better mesa and uh real tech support and a ton of customizations for fluxbox and then obviously this is uh debian 11 bullseye based okay so those are the new things in mx 21 wildflower uh i'm going to tell you right now every time i try mx linux i'm just blown away by how really really good it is and i would i mean it's not for me i don't think it's the prettiest desktop out there but it's xfce you can change xfc to look however you want it's not as like restrictive as like gnomes uh that's my second shot against gnom in this video i think that is the rule where i have to shoot i have to shoot gnom every time in every video but um so you can make it look however you want i don't particularly care for the theming and the window decorations and stuff like that but it's not the ugliest thing i've ever seen it's perfectly usable the tools that they give new users are just top of the line they're so good and i mean even that i mean every time i look at that bash rc editor is it just blows my mind that it exists but it's a good idea because most new users don't know what the fuck a bash rc is they just don't and they won't even not only do they don't know what exists but they don't know why you'd want to edit it uh and it's cool that that's there it might be a little bit confusing because again most people aren't going to know why they should edit that but for the curious amongst the new users that might give them a like a gateway into becoming more of a nerd and using the terminal a little bit more and that's good for everybody because there's a lot of more efficient ways of doing things in the terminal than you know through a GUI so that's really cool i really love it and all like i said the the mx tweak tool again awesome because it's i mean it's not as if those settings don't exist other places but they've gone through and crammed them all in one place and it's made it so much easier to edit your panel edit your themes edit the display uh you know the resolution and the the scaling and all that stuff all in one place really cool uh i highly recommend mx linux if if i see the thing this is where it's hard the two debian based distributions that i like the most are sparky and mx linux now i will say this if you're looking for if you're a new user and you need those extra tools those those tools that are going to help you transition into using linux mx is by far what you should use if you are a long time user of linux but you don't want to deal with the debian non-free bullshit uh sparky is probably the one you should go with because that just gives you mostly a just a vanilla debian install just but without the again debian bullshit that you have to deal with for installing stuff it uses a calmaris installer so between mx and sparky debian has some really good options for both new users and long time users so they don't actually have to use regular stock debian which is probably a good thing because debian has its own problems as we've discussed many times so that is it for us on this video if you have any questions about mx linux i will try to answer them in the comment section below if you have used mx linux and you really like it as much as i seem to you can also leave those comments in the comment section below make sure you like and subscribe to the video for many more distribution reviews and long-term reviews and window manager stuff i really do appreciate everybody who subscribes so i uh thank you for subscribing you can follow me on twitter at the next cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast before i go i'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons devon chris east coast web gen 2 is fun too patrick l marcus maiglin jackson knife tool steve a mitchell art senator marik camp josh willy j dog and bsg is rock every time i go through the patrons i feel like i should go through and criss long out of their names uh but because i'm a benevolent person i won't do that and make everybody suffer for me singing because that would be a pure and utter torture thanks everybody for watching i'll see you next time