 MX Linux is one of those distributions that I have used many times before, but I've never actually lived long term in. And I figured it was time that I corrected that mistake because every time I use MX Linux in a VM or whatever, I always come across really impressed like all their tools and all their stuff. It's just a really very cohesive experience. And I've always enjoyed it. So I wanted to see if that experience translated into using it long term. So that's what we're going to do today. This is the long term review of MX Linux. Now, just to let everybody know, I have been using other Linux distros. So if you've been watching the channel, you'll have seen me switch to men jar on all that stuff. So it hasn't been 100% full time. So I just want to kind of put that out there. I want to be dishonest about it. But for the vast majority of my time every day on Linux, I've been using MX. I've also installed it on my main computer on that computer behind me on my laptop. They're all running MX Linux. Now, the only distribution on that one in the laptop is MX Linux. So I have some really good experience. Now I've been using this now for very close to two months, almost full time. So let's go ahead and jump into the review. The first thing we should talk about is installation. Now I'm going to be putting up some b roll of me actually installing MX Linux in a VM. And you'll see that the installer is not like any installer you've seen before. And this is a completely custom installer. And it is fantastic for the most part. So the things I like about it the most is that it's really simple. It's really easy to use. It has all the instructions you'll ever need right there along the side. And it's extremely fast. I'll probably still be talking about the installation and installation will probably already be done. It took like two minutes. That's about all it took about the only thing I don't like about the installer itself is the partition manager they built in. It's not the most intuitive thing that you'll ever see. So if you have to do manual partitioning, the way they do it is just not all that great. It's not bad per se. It's just not intuitive. I would much prefer them just give you a link to something like G parted or something and then just let you go through and do the partitioning that way. It's it's not the best partition manager that I've ever seen. But outside of that, everything else is fantastic. I highly enjoy the fact that you can go through and save all your live desktop changes to the install so that you can go through and use those once you've installed it. So if you go through and that customized something or you download something in the live, it will actually translate through to the install. That's really cool. You can do all the normal stuff like encrypt, add network settings, all this kind of stuff right inside the installer. And it's really good, right? It's it's refreshing to see a distro go through and create something that is uniquely theirs and not just use calamaris. Now there's nothing wrong with calamaris, obviously, but the fact that MX has gone through and actually put the effort into making a very nice installer that installs the distro very, very fast is just refreshing. It's really nice. I highly enjoyed it. Now, once you get past the installer, the out of box experience is going to be a little bit different depending on what ISO you've chosen. So the one that you'll see in the B roll is MX Linux X FCE edition. And you'll have a panel along the side and it's basically X FCE. The differences between the X FCE version and the KDE version are simply that one is X FCE and one is KDE. They do look a little bit different, like with the KDE, when you don't have a bar along the side, it's at the bottom. But for the most part, the tools are exactly the same. The biggest difference you're going to see between the two ISOs is the MX Linux tweak tool is different with the X FCE version, the tweak tool is going to give you a lot more options. You'll see this in the B roll, where you'll have just a ton more stuff that you can do. You can change the panel position. You can change. You can reset the default panel. You can go through and change the theme of X FCE, change the icons, change the fonts, all this stuff with the plasma version of the MX Linux tweak tool, which you also get linked to in the welcome screen. It's not as full feature and that simply comes down to the fact that plasma, as far as I'm aware, doesn't actually allow developers to tie into that stuff, whereas the X FCE does. So that's really the biggest difference between the two ISOs. In terms of the rest of the out of box experience, the welcome application or the welcome screen or whatever is exactly the same between both ISOs. And you get links to videos and documentation of PDF documentation and several ways of gaining support and stuff against typical welcome screen stuff. There's nothing truly special here. The one thing I will say that I really like is the fact that by default, you actually have to click on something in order to get that welcome screen to come up every time you reboot. Every distro I've ever seen will always go through and have that checked automatically, like by default, you have to uncheck it in order to get the welcome screen to never show up again with MX. It's the opposite way around. And that's the way it really should be. In terms of pre installed software, this is where you're going to get up. It's a little mixed bag because you're going to get the default stuff that you normally get in a Linux distribution. You're going to get you know, media players and stuff like that just the normal stuff where you'll see the biggest amount of software is actually with MX tools. There are just a ton of MX tools that are pre installed. And they're all really good. And we'll I'll go through some of them here in a few minutes. But there are just probably 12 or 13 or 14 MX tools that are in your menu system. And those are going to be what takes up the vast majority of your pre installed applications. Outside of that MX links is not uploaded. Let's draw by any means it has the default applications that you would expect they've made some choices. But there's nothing here that is like, Oh, well, they'll have six different MP3 players or, you know, four different ways of viewing photos. That's not the case. Usually they have one. And it's a good one. So don't expect to come in here and have like a distribution that just has hundreds and hundreds of pre installed package, they just have what you need. And then you're kind of left on your own as as you should be. So the next thing we should talk about and now we're going to actually move over into my actual install of MX Linux, which is right here, I'm going to go through and turn my camera off because I don't know if you guys have seen this in the in the video and I don't know how it translates. But the motion blur in OBS today is just horrendous. I got a new camera and getting it set up in MX links has not been easy. There's no sense in making people sick with the motion blur. So this is what my MX Linux looks like right now. And as you can see, I've chosen the plasma version. And it's where I've spent my time. And I've already talked about the plasma experience on MX Linux a little bit earlier in a previous video, when I talked about spending time in KD plasma. For the most part, this is a very standard KDE experience. I've had really no problems with it. There's nothing specific to KDE on MX Linux that I found disagreeable. I had more problems with actually moving into a like a floating window manager's desktop environment than anything else. And that has nothing to do with MX Linux. I will say that because MX Linux is based on Debian, I should have said that earlier, but it's based on a Debian stable because that's the case. A lot of your software is going to be a little bit out of date. And that is probably and that's something I'm going to talk about when I come to say comes to software availability. But just know that when it comes to KDE plasma, the stuff here is a little old and that kind of led me to miss out on some of the things that KDE has done over the last few months in order to make things better. So just keep that in mind if that's going to be a problem for you. It's not really an MX problem simply because they've gone through and based themselves on Debian. That's just the way Debian is. So that's the KDE experience. In terms of updating, there's two ways of doing it. You can do it through Discover or you can do it through the terminal. This isn't a Debian based distro so you can use app just like you would use in any other Debian based distro. There's not a lot here that I can say about updates. It's you didn't get a lot of updates, but you wouldn't expect that from a Debian based distro. You're going to get the vast majority of the updates will come through and they'll just be minor tweaks. You're never going to get something that is going to be system changing simply because that's not the way really Debian is meant to be used. And MX is the same way since it's based on it. So you're going to get some application updates. I think the most updates I've ever seen is about 10. So if you're coming from Arch where you get 10 sometimes a day, you're going to notice that you're just not going to see a lot of updates here. And that's just the nature of the beast. So that's updating. So when it comes to installing software itself, it's actually fairly easy, but there's multiple ways of doing it. You can obviously open up a terminal and do pseudo apt install, whatever you can do that, or you can use discover if you really want to use discover. I've never really had that great of experience with discover, but you can use it. Okay. And if you prefer something that looks like an app store, discover is going to be your option. But because this is MX Linux, we have a tool. So we have a package manager called MX package installer. It'll ask you for your password, which will inevitably not type correctly. And then you're going to get this. Now, this is my favorite way of installing applications on MX Linux. And the reason why is you're going to find stuff here that you probably won't find using app. And also, because this is a GUI installer, it allows you to go through and install from different places. So for example, you can install things from the stable repo, the MX test repo, Debbie and back ports and flat packs all from this one place. So for example, if let's just say you wanted to install the OBS flat pack, you could just search for OBS here. And you can install OBS studio, which is for whatever reason, just called studio in flat pack world. And then install it that way and hit then hit install, you can also upgrade packages right from here. So the reason why this is so good is just simply because it allows you to go through and search for things easier than you would if you were using apt. Now you can obviously do pseudo apt search or whatever it is. And it will do okay. But that's only going to pull from just the one repository that it has access to the main repositories or whatever repositories you have enabled. With this, you get access to everything. And it's really good. And like I said, I've experienced some situations where there were applications that I couldn't find through app that I found through here. Unfortunately, I didn't write those applications down. So I don't remember what they were. But I do remember it happening. My memory seems to be, you know, going out the door. But the point is, is that if you can't find something through apt come here, and you might be able to find it. And especially that'll be true. If what you're searching for isn't available at all on the Debian repose or the MX repose, and it's available through flat pack, you can install those through here instead of having to go through and do the whole messing around with flat hub. So that is installing software. Now, moving on to software availability. This is where we get into a little bit of a prickly situation. Because again, this is based on Debian. And because that's true, there are certain things that just aren't available on Debian that are also not available on MX Linux, because of the same reason. So for example, alacrity is not here. Now, if you don't know what alacrity is, it doesn't really matter. It's a terminal emulator, but it's not available in Debian. And because it's not available in Debian, it's also not available in MX Linux. So if we actually go through and actually search for alacrity here, we'll see that it's actually not here. We searched through all those things. Now I was able to get alacrity installed through building it, but it's not the same, you know, if you know what I mean, other than that, I was actually fairly impressed with software availability. There were some very weird programs that I use things like the Rofi power menu, things, things like Rofi emoji that weren't available. And there are several things that I thought weren't available that were available or named weirdly. So for example, I use uberzug for image preview and ranger. You can't do pseudo apt install uberzug because that's not the way it works. It's actually called pseudo apt install Python dash uberzug or however hell you pronounce it. And I didn't know that. So I thought that it wasn't available, but it is actually here. And I came across several of those situations where the package name was completely different than what I expected it to be because it's named something different on Arch. And for the longest time, I just thought that some of those packages weren't available, but they were, they just had weird names. So I highly recommend if you're going through and installing stuff in nmxlinux, you should go through and find out what the actual package name is instead of just assuming that it's the same as which you would find on other distros. That's where my assumption kind of led me astray. Other than that, like I said, I was very impressed with the software availability. I do admit that I used several flat packs. So for example, I'm using the flat pack of OBS. I'm using the flat pack of Kaden live. I'm using the flat pack of steam. I'm using the flat pack to do this because while steam is in Kaden live are both in the repos, I wanted to make sure I had the most stable version of them. I also couldn't find to do this in the repos, which is not surprising because it's not in hardly any repos, even on arch you have to get it from the AUR. I'm also using the flat pack of Bitwarden, which is also not in the Debian repositories or the MX repositories. So the great thing I suppose about flat pack is that you can go through and find applications that are in the repos so you still have access to them. In terms of flat pack itself, I've had truly mixed experiences with the OBS version of the flat pack is fine. But the problem is it doesn't use the standard OBS configuration file like in the locations that you normally see it. So normally what I do when I have multiple distros installed is that I take my master OBS configuration folder out of my .config and put it into the .config of the new distro. You can't do that when you use the flat pack because the flat pack application uses a configuration file that's located somewhere else. So you can't actually get those things to go through and use the file that you want to use. And that's the reason why I'm having so many problems with my cameras because I got all this camera stuff worked out on Manjaro yesterday. It was working fine. I get to MX Linux today and I have motion blur, I have fuzziness and that's simply because all of my settings that I had in the Manjaro version, I can't actually get here on MX Linux because of that. That's not an MX Linux problem, that's a flat pack problem. And like I said my experience with flat pack has just been kind of meh. You know what I mean? It's just kind of meh. I like it better than snaps, but that's not actually saying on it much because I despise snaps with a passion. So that software availability, like I said, for the most part I'm highly impressed with it. It's not as good as art, but what is? I mean, seriously, there's nothing out there that can compare to the AUR. But in terms of software availability, the fact that they have so many options available for you to choose from, you know, the Debian back porch, the MX test repo, the stable repo, all these places, you get all these options. Chances are for the vast majority of software, you're going to find it whether you have to use flat pack or something else. I don't think there was a single application I ended up with that I couldn't actually find. Well, I think one of a couple of the Rofi scripts that I use had to build, but I usually have to build those in Arch too. So expecting MX Linux to have those is kind of unfair. So the next section is gaming. And here you'll see me going back to a little bit of a B-roll here from gaming. And honestly, my gaming experience is going to be a little bit less because everybody knows I'm not much of a gamer, but I have been trying to game a little bit more. And the thing is, is my experience on Arch, like the the two Arch based issues that I've been using, Arco and Manjaro lately, the gaming experience on those is pretty bad. And the reason why is simply because proton doesn't work on those distros. For whatever reason I can't get the proton to work. I'm assuming it's because I had the distro install steam and the distro installer didn't install certain dependencies or something. It doesn't matter. It's not a big deal. It just means I can't game anything on anything that uses proton on either those two distros. On MX Linux, I didn't have that problem at all. So I've found that anything that I use proton for worked fine. Assuming that it worked on Linux at all. I mean you can't do, you can't play a game that won't play no matter what distro it is if it's not available for Linux. For most games, things like Civilization, Cities, Skylines, stuff like that, it played flawlessly. I don't have a high resolution monitor or high frame rate monitor. So I can't tell you though that it's an amazing experience. You get 200 frames per second. I don't know any of that. It played well to my eyes. And as long as something's 30 frames per second, I'm perfectly happy. But I know that I'm in the minority there. Most people want 60 frames per second and stuff like that. So your mileage as usual when it comes to gaming will vary depending on your hardware and all that stuff. But for the most part, gaming was a good enough experience. It allowed me to play several games that I wasn't able to play on Arch. And that's good. I did try Lutris to try to get Hearthstone installed. That did not work. And that is because it bugged out not being able to find certain fonts in the repositories. So if you're going to go through and use Lutris, you'll need to make sure that you can find the dependencies that you need for Lutris to actually function. Wine seemed to work just fine and get installed just fine. It was always just hung up on finding certain fonts. So the next thing I want to talk about are the MX Linux tools. So if you go to this category here, the MX Linux tools, you'll see that there are just a ton of different tools here that are for MX Linux. Now I'm not going to go through all these because we'd be here all day, but there are several that I want to point out. So the first one is the repo manager. The repo manager allows you to choose different mirrors. It allows you to choose different repos. And it allows you to go through and have it select the fastest mirror for you. So this is actually a really cool tool when it works. So if you want to go through and add the non free bullseye repository, you can go through if you want to add the the backports bullseye non free repositories, you can go through and do that. And that's going to give you access to many more packages than what you'd get with the default repositories. You can also go through and add the Ubuntu repositories if you want to go through and do that. Now the reason why I say when it works, if you go through and actually select these, sometimes you'll get errors saying something along the lines this repository is not doesn't have something or the other and it doesn't work. Your your update will just fail. I came across that multiple times and actually ended going through and just hitting this restore original app sources button and those errors went away. So some of the repos here don't seem to work all the time. And that's not a great thing. So let me see if I can actually get that error to come up. I'm going to apply this we're going to do okay and then we're going to open up a terminal and we'll zoom in here sudo apt update. Yeah I seem to work just fine that time with those those certain repositories. But the point is I've noticed it sometimes where okay so after going through and enabling the Ubuntu repositories this was the error that I was talking about. It says does not have a release file so those the non free ones here work these two don't seem to work at all. So they go through and you just get this release file here. Now I'm assuming that there's a way to fix this. I didn't actually go through and investigate actually trying to you know fix it. But the point is is that it might be hit or miss for you. The fact that the tool exists is really cool. So that is the repo manager and that will give you access to more software if you can't find it in the standard repositories. The next one I want to talk about is mx cleanup. Mx cleanup is similar to bleach bit but easier and not as dangerous. So it'll allow you to go through and clear your app cache a clear clean folders delete your logs empty the trash and the coolest thing about it is that you can go through and schedule it. We're going to talk about cron jobs here in a few minutes when I talk about the things that I don't like but going through and having this run weekly or monthly or whatever will keep a lot of the craft off your system and I really really like that it's something that I wish was on other distros and there are obviously ways you can do this on other distros but this is the cleanest way I've ever seen of doing it. So that's the mx cleanup. So I only have two more that I want to show you the next one is mx tweak and I'm just going to show you this because you can go through and kind of see the differences between this and the xfce version that I showed you earlier. There's not as much here as there is with the xfce version so the tweak tool is not as powerful in plasma as it is in the xfce version. So if that matters to you choose the xfce version the last one that I wanted to show you was the mx snapshot tool. Now I'm not going to go through and actually go through and show you the process of this because I have a video on it but this is my favorite tool that exists. It allows you to go through and create an ISO of your complete system and then you can it saves that on your your disk and then you can burn it to a USB key and make make it take it to another computer and install it over there and you have all access everything like right under your music and everything. As you can see if you have steam installed you get coming to problem which I'll talk about here in a second but for the most part this is a fantastic tool and I want it everywhere especially for someone who wants to use the same setup on multiple computers going through and creating an ISO of your perfect setup and moving it to other computers and then having a backup of that setup is just awesome. Now the one thing I wish this had is on this next screen where it has the availability to go through and exclude certain things I wish it would allow you to go through and exclude the default steam game location file. Now I know you can go through and add that through a text file and it's fairly easy enough but I would really like it just be a checkbox here. Don't let my steam games come through I don't need those things backed up on the ISO. That would save me from having a 70 gigabyte ISO by the way because that thing would take forever to burn to a disk if you even have a USB key that big. Being able to exclude the steam directory would be fantastic and it's only really the only thing that would say we can make this better. So those are the tools. So we only have a few more things to talk about but let's talk about a couple of the things that I didn't care for. So the first and the biggest thing is going to be the fact that this is not a system D distro. Now for the most part it didn't bother me at all. Like for the most part I did not interact with the init system at all. I'm used to system D but for the most part not having it didn't make me sad. There were however some situations where I missed it. So for example there are certain rofi scripts that I use some to shut down the computer stuff like that that rely on system D tools in order to work and those don't work on this thing because it doesn't use system D uses sysvnit which is a different init system altogether and that just meant that there were certain tools that just wouldn't work that would normally have working. So for example I had to do cron jobs in a completely different way. Normally I would just install crony and then set up a cron tab and go on my way. That doesn't work here because that relies on system D. Now there is a way to get it working with sysvnit. You can go through and do that if you want to. I didn't. I just went through and used the MX Linux tool that is called job scheduler and basically what job scheduler does is performs the job of going through and creating cron tasks cron jobs and it's fine. I'm not used to using a GUI to set cron jobs but you can do it. It's fairly easy and that's the way I went through and did instead of trying to figure out how to get crony to work. I just did it this way. Really that's the bottom line is that pretty much any way anything that you need system D to do you can do here. You just kind of have to work around the stuff. You know what I mean? And it's an okay experience. Now if you want to go through and use system D, there is an option to boot into a system D version of MX Linux. I did that a couple times. The experience is fine but you can tell the MX Linux developers want you to stick with the Sysvnit version and it just doesn't feel like a first class citizen. It works fine. It's just the Sysvnit version works better. So if you're going to use this just know going in that it doesn't have system D by default. It works fine without it but you're just going to every once in a while experience some hiccups. The other thing that I didn't like and really this is just minor is that for whatever reason the mirrors were slow. So even when you go through and hit that button that I showed you earlier find fastest mirrors to me near me for whatever reason even after I've done that the mirrors are just slow. Now I don't know if that's a me problem. Maybe it's just something that my network doesn't like particular about this system. I don't know. I will say that I've noticed it on all three of the computers that have MX Linux installed. The mirrors just seem slow. Now they're not horrendously slow or anything. It's just something that they're slow enough that I noticed that they were slow. If that makes sense. So those were really the only two things that I had a negative experience on you. I can't even really say that the system D thing was a negative experience. It's just that I had to find alternative ways of doing some things. The slow mirrors thing is just something I kind of learned to live with. It's not as slow as say something like the open Suza stuff like the open Suza has notoriously slow mirrors when you're not near open Suza's headquarters. It's not that slow. It was just a little slow. Okay. So three more sections for this talking about stability. This is Debbie and stable. It works really well in terms of stability. I never had any crashes. None of that stuff. I did have K-Wing crash on this machine several times. But that's a KDE plasma problem. I'm almost positive and I'm 100% sure. And I've been told that they fixed the K-Wing problems on newer versions of plasma. So that's another kind of disadvantage of using something that's older is that some of the fixes you're not going to get. So just know if you're going to use the KDE plasma version, you're going to probably see K-Wing, which is the compositor and the window manager. You'll see that crash from time to time. Except not a big deal. But it's definitely something you should know. Outside of that, stability was fine. Now community support is where this really shines. They have forums. And the thing is, is that I've actually talked to the MX Linux developers and they have very friendly people. And one of the great things about them is if you find a package that they don't have in their repositories, a lot of times they'll actually try hard enough to go through and package that for you. Now it's not 100%. I'm sure that they're very busy people. So don't expect it to be immediate. But I've seen multiple places where they've gone through and said that they will do that kind of stuff. The community itself has been very welcoming. I've had no situations where I've had to go through and had somebody say read that thing manual. They've just helped me. And it's been very good. So that is my review of MX Linux. I probably could go on for probably a few more hours talking about how much I really enjoy this distribution. It is really, really good. Honestly, if by default it was system D, this distro would be my new favorites. Like it'd be the one that I would use for sure everywhere. Daily driver, I would abandon Arco for this distribution. And the biggest reason for that is because it has so many really cool tools. I only showed you a few of them, but there are several of these tools that have just gone through and really transformed the way I use the distro. And a lot of those are necessities because like the job schedule, schedule or tool is something that there is there because you actually have to have it because the other ways of scheduling crown jobs usually aren't available to you because most of the crown demons or whatever you call them are written for system D. I'm sure there are Sysvian knit options out there, but for the most part the vast majority of the the crown job stuff is going to be written for system D. So some of the tools are absolute necessities, but I really do like the rest of the tools and that is what has made it really good. And I've enjoyed using a Debian based distro for a change. Like I've been using Arch or an Arch based distro full time for almost three years and it has been nice to have a really good experience on a Debian based distro. It's kind of rare for me. Like I used Debian and it was fine, but it just felt lacking to me. This is the first time I've used a Debian based distro and haven't immediately missed the AUR. Like because the software ability is so good here. I didn't remember, there was only a couple of times where I could actually say that, you know, I wish I had AUR. So one thing that I didn't cover that I should have covered a little bit more is versioning. So you will, just like with every Debian based distro, you're going to find situations where the stuff that you have on your system is too old for certain things. So for example, if you need, you're running a Python script, if you don't have the certain version of Python that that script is looking for, you're probably going to run into problems. And because things are older on Debian based distros, sometimes you won't have the particular versions of stuff that you're going to need. I ran into that a couple of times, like for example, my weather script, which is a Python script, wouldn't work. There's a Perl script that I used, that wouldn't work because it was looking for a different version. That's just the kind of stuff that you have to deal with when you're using Debian. So we're using a Debian based distro, I should say. Other than that stuff, MX Linux has been just a treat to use. Now the question I always ask myself after I've done this is am I going to continue to use it? And the answer to that question, for the first time ever is yes. MX Linux is going to stay on that one, for sure. Now the laptop is probably going to change to whatever I review next, simply because then I can have those the distros on multiple computers. But that one there right behind me is going to stay on MX Linux. And I want to see how well this thing upgrades through the versions. So for example, when the next version of MX Linux comes out, I would love to be able to go through and say I upgraded from one version to the next, and I can kind of make a video on how the process of that was, because I'll take a first look view of that next version, and I'll have a little bit more experience with it then. So the answer to that, the question is yes, I'm going to stick with MX at least on one computer. So that is it for this video. If you have questions about MX Linux, you can leave those questions in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter, at Linuxcast. I want to take a moment again to apologize for the motion blur, holy hell. I don't know how to fix that. So I'm assuming it's a flat-pack problem, because I didn't have the same problem with the Arch version, so whatever. Anyways, you can also support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash links cast before I go. I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons.