 Over the last couple years MX Linux has become very popular and for good reason It's really good and every time I make an MX Linux video I'm always surprised at how good I find it now right now I'm in the middle of a long-term MX links review and that video should be up towards the end of January But what I thought I'd do today is talk about five things You absolutely must do after you've installed MX Linux for the first time now one thing We should say when you go about doing this is that For the most part the process is going to be exactly the same no matter what version of MX Linux you've installed So if you've installed the MX Linux KDE version or the MX Linux X FCE version It really doesn't matter the only thing that's going to change is The tweak tool is going to be a little bit more robust on the X FCE version And the look and feel will be a little bit different obviously because they're different desktop environments So I'm going to be using the KDE version But for the most part the things that I show you will be the exact same no matter what version you're using So let's go ahead and jump in with the first thing you should do after installing MX Linux So the first thing you should do is open up a terminal and update your system Now the one thing you'll notice is that my terminal looks a little bit different than yours likely will And that's just simply because I've gone through and customized my terminal to look a bit different Yours will probably look like this and that's fine They're both gonna function exactly the same, but we'll go with the way the default is so in order to update your system You want to do sudo apt update What that's going to do is update all the mirrors that are attached to your system And that will allow you to get the most recent list of software that is available to Your system and also will allow MX Linux to find to figure out which packages on your system are in need of An update in my case. I have none, but we'll do sudo apt upgrade Which is the next thing you'll want to do so hit enter after that and It will go through and update every package on your system now two things to note here first You'll probably have to enter your root password somewhere along the line. So make sure you keep that in mind It's not unusual. In fact, it would be unusual if it didn't ask for me I've already input my password within this terminal session So it didn't ask me the next thing you should keep in mind is that because MX Linux is built on Debbie and stable the first time you update you're going to get the most updates You'll probably ever see it probably won't be a ton of updates But there's going to be quite a few after that point You'll see fewer and fewer updates simply because Debbie and stable doesn't get very many upgrades So you'll know once you've gone through and done that initial update of your system that you probably won't see that many ever again Now once you've done this reboot your computer because there are certain packages that won't take effect Won't be updated until the kernel is out of memory So always just go through and reboot your computer after you update You don't technically have to but it's best to do it now then do it later Once you've updated your system and have restarted your computer The next thing you'll want to do is tweak your setup just a little bit now I'm not going to talk about going through and racing your system or customizing it full-fledged You can do that pretty much on your own at any time mostly what I'm talking about this time is seeking out the MX Linux tweak tool and Changing the position of your panel so if you're going to go through and Use your system frame on a time you'll want to go through and make sure that it's to your liking and You can change your themes and stuff like that in the traditional ways of doing so now depending on which Desktop environment you're using that process will be a little bit different That's why I'm not going to talk about actually changing themes here Because that process is different between the two desktop environments But for the panel position you can actually go through and change that in MX tweak tool and it's really easy You just go through and change it like this hit apply and it will go through and move it to the top It might take a little while on Katie. It's a little bit faster in XFCE Now in XFCE you'll have several other options in MX tweak tool Then you'll get in Katie and that's just simply because it's a little easier to pull that stuff out of XFCE and put it in a Custom tool than it is in Katie, which is much more Constraining when it where the settings are if that makes any sense at all So in Katie you don't have nearly as many options in tweak tool in XFCE. You can go through and do several things Including I believe change your themes and your dark and light modes and all that stuff right from the tweak tool If that's what you want to do So mess around with the tweak tool after you've done your updates and you'll be able to Have your system look the way you want to look right off the bat So once you've done that the next thing is to start installing your software now I'm not going to go through the process of that too much But there are a couple things you should know about Installing software on MX links now. Obviously you can do the traditional thing and do pseudo App install audacity or whatever you can do that from the terminal if that's what you want to do It's just Debian so you can pretty much do anything you would do in a Debian based distro from the terminal Just use act if that's what you want to do and if that's what you're familiar with for everyone else You can go through and use the GUI package manager that MX Linux comes with so you'll go to your menu Go to MX tools go to MX package installer it'll ask for your root password and then you'll see a list and Location of things that you can install so the popular applications stuff from the stable repo some stuff from the MX test repo The Debian back ports and flat packs So these last three is going to pop up a warning saying hey This is stuff that's not supported by MX actually. I think it's just the last two Are you sure you want to view these things obviously that's paraphrasing but you can just go ahead and hit yes And you can choose or whether or not to show that message again. Basically right here is your your app store It's not as pretty as other app stores, but I find it more Functional simply because it gives you the ability to find stuff from different repos fairly easily So you can just go through and you can do searches if you want so let's just say we wanted to find Kate in live We can go through and just do that hit this here and then update now Similar to what you'd find on like manjaro with Pamac. You can actually go through and Select multiple things so now we've selected Kate in live. We can go through and find let's just say OBS Studio right here and then hit that and then then you'd go through and hit the install button and it would install it now I'm not gonna do this because I already have both of those things installed That's the one downside of using this GUI package manager if you've gone through Previously like save you're installing packages later on into your MX Linux Usage and you've installed packages both from the package installer and the terminal you'll find that the package installer doesn't Actually know what you have installed unless you've installed it from the package installer previously So if you installed Kate in live from the flat from flat hub like I have which is from a terminal command It doesn't actually know that that's installed. So that's one downside of it But if you install all of your applications from the package installer It'll go through and remember what you have installed and you can just go through and you'll know that it's there It also allows you to filter things from installed upgradeable and not installed and it allows you to install things from like flat Pack in flat hub. So if you can't find something from the Debian repos you can go through and Choose to install things from flat up or you can download a flat pack Package directly from like a website or something and then search for that from the home directory That's what you want to do. If you don't want to use flat up now Let's just say you still can't find the software that you want to install There's a possibility you might be able to fix that by going to the repo managers So you want to type in repo here and it's just going to be MX repo manager They'll ask you again for your pack your root password. What this tool does is it allows you to choose? Do two things it will allow you to change the mirrors that you're using So for example, if your download speeds during your update process were really slow You can go through and change to a different mirror. So for example, there are several Mirrors here in the United States that I could choose from and you want to choose the one that's closest to you So so for me, I'm pretty sure Madison is probably actually going to be a little bit closer but you can also just select this button here and it will go through and Test each mirror based on the speed and then it will select the one that was the fastest. I Don't think that this is actually going to end up changing anything. Oh it did it changed to Illinois, okay, that's fine, and then it will actually won't take effect until the next time you run pseudo apt update So that's one thing that the repo manager does the other thing it allows you to do is select other repos So you can check things Like the bullseye non-free repo will allow you to install more proprietary software Same thing with the back ports, which will allow you to install newer Non-free software so you can just go through and check those things hit apply and then it will go through and Update those mirrors the next time you do pseudo apt update It will also go through and list all the repos that you've added over time So if you've used MX links for a while chances are you've probably added other repositories when you found a piece of software that wasn't in the Standard Debbie and repositories and that will be listed here and allow you to unselect it if you no longer want to update from that repository So we're just gonna get in close and then once you you've gone through and done that just run pseudo apt update again And it will go through all those repos that you selected earlier And we'll update those mirrors so that you have the most recent version of the the software list It will take longer as you can see it will take longer than it did before some because you're now pulling from many more mirrors You also may get some errors. So just keep that in mind So once you've gone through and done that the next thing you'll want to do is install codex So there is a tool for this in MX Linux called the codec tool So you go to MX tools and then you find MX codex installer it will again ask you for your password It will then ask you if you are going to be okay assuming legal responsibility for downloading the codex now The reason why is because a lot of these codecs are proprietary and they all have you laser and user license agreements And this is basically just asking you if you agree with those license agreements go hit Okay, it's gonna go through and download all the codecs that you want So this will allow you to play things like DRM content like mp3 content and stuff like that things that require Proprietary codecs in order to work now if you're just gonna use like something like VLC That's probably going to download those along to the dependency and it'll just work But if you're gonna use some other media player or you're gonna use a browser that needs certain DRM functionality Downloading the codex will enable all of your media media to play no matter whether it's needs that stuff or not Once it's done, okay, and then it will go away. That's literally all there is to it And you'll only ever have to install that once you'll never have to do that again. Okay, so the last one on the list is Probably the most important not that's debatable I suppose because technically updating your system is very important But for me no matter what you do you should always back up your system no matter what and you should set that Process up so that it's automatic So when you want to do a backup, there are a couple ways you can do it You can download an app called time shift and I'm not gonna talk about how to use time shift Simply because it's not installed by default by default mxlinks comes with a tool called back in time and Basically what back in time does is allows you to back up your system and you can do so by just searching back in time in your Menu or you can do this either with the root or without root and I'm going to go ahead and use root So that's going to allow me to back up things that are password protected And Ella would allow me to save my backup into a place that is also password protected or requires User root user privileges. I'm not actually going to do that in this case So it doesn't really matter which one I use but I'm just used to using this one So once you go ahead and to your password and the first time you run this It's going to come up here back in time is not configured Would you like to restore previous configuration if you never run this before hit? No, if you have and you have a configuration saved you can hit yes So I'm just gonna know and this is what you're going to come up with now What this does is just backs up your system So the first thing I want to do is choose a place where it will allow you to save the Snapshot that is going to create you'll want to do this on a drive that is not your main drive That way if your main drive fails, you can go through and still have all of your data So in my case, I'm going to save it to my external hard drive. So in which case I'm going to go here and media and Dr. M dub and Artemis will in backups and We'll create a new folder here called Mx Linux And choose and then what we're going to do is create a schedule So what basically what this will do is allow you to change How often this is runs so in this case I'm going to choose every day at midnight is fine And we'll want to go to the include tab and hit add folder I want to do the entire home directory so slash and then home and then choose Okay, and then what I'm going to want to do is check and see if they're auto-remove Functionality is set the way I wanted to do so what this will do is we'll delete things that are older It will delete snapshots that are older 10 than 10 years It'll also remove things if the space is less than one gigabyte or if the free in nodes are less than 2% It'll also allow you to go through and hit smart remove and you can keep all snapshots for the last two days Keep one snapshot per day for the last seven days and so on and so forth This way you can kind of make sure that your hard drive doesn't get filled up really fast You can also go through and Sorry about the dog. I can't I can't control when they start decided to play You can also go through and select several options like not Allowing snapshots to happen on battery because this is going to take up some amount of resources while it's running You can also have it So it's only doing one snapshot at a time because you want you can go through and shut up snapshots For different folders, so I'm going to be doing the whole home directory Your snapshots will be quicker if you just do smaller directories So once you've done with this just go ahead, okay And then you want to hit this button here that says take snapshot It'll actually go through and do the snapshot. It'll take a while depending on how big the directory is In this case, I'm doing the whole home directory. So it's going to take a while So once you've done that you've backed up your computer. It will also go through and set up a Cron job. I don't think it's actually what it's doing is a cron job But it will set up a schedule so that we'll go through and do this Every single night at midnight like I selected there in the first step So once that's done, you'll you've backed up your system and you have A working backup just in case something goes wrong As a bonus you can check out my video on the mx linux snapshot tool Basically what that will allow you to do is create an iso of your system So all the software that you've installed all the themes that you've set everything It'll put it on an iso and that way you can put all that stuff onto a usb key And reinstall your system exactly as it was when you created iso And that way you'll never lose anything. It's kind of like an extra way of backing up So that is it for this video those are the five things that I've Chosen to do every time I've installed mx linux, which I've now done like four or five times because I've put it on all of my computers I'm this is probably going to be my most in-depth long-term review simply because I've found that I really really like mx linux There are some things that I don't like about it. There are a lot of things that I really enjoy about it So I'm really looking forward to making that video because I have tons of thoughts in my head about the experience that I've had so far I've been using it now for a couple weeks But uh, I want to use the couple weeks more before I record that video I'm very anxious about it. But anyways, that is it for this video If you have thoughts you can leave those in the comment section below You can follow me on twitter at linuxcast and if you'd like to support me on patreon like these fine people You can do so at patreon.com slash linuxcast. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time