Although I wouldn't recommend MX Linux as a "complete-noob" distro, I'm really liking it for the following reasons:
- First of all, the community is excellent, and any help I asked for in this forum was answered very quickly! Thank you everyone! This one point alone makes all the little nitpicks easy to overcome.
- XFCE is blazing fast.
- My video driver for hardware acceleration was easy to install. It was an all-graphical process, and this installation tool was included with the default install.
- I did have to spend a good 2-3 hours tweaking it, poring through all the MX tools, and various desktop preferences and settings to get it all nice. A few key takeaways:
- I have a HiDPI screen. To globally scale the font sizes up and down to match my DPI, I found where to do that in Settings -> Appearance -> "Fonts" tab -> DPI -> Check the "Custom DPI" checkbox, then scale up and down.
- For nice window shadows and semitransparent windows (when not focused), I found that in Settings -> MX tools -> Tweak -> "Compositor" tab -> pick "Compton" -> "Compton Settings" button -> Check "Enabled client-side shadows on windows", then in the "Opacity" Tab, I made the "Default opacity of inactive windows" 0.85, and the "Opacity of window titlebars and borders" 0.90. I also checked "Blur background of transparent windows".
- For the theme, on the "Theme" tab (still in the "MX Tweak" tool), I chose "MX Dark", and also checked "Firefox Dark theme tweak", which is important so that you don't have light-colored text being typed into textboxes (in Firefox), whose background is also light-colored! It's really great when a dark theme actually works well in all the places where you need it to! (...and it's actually surprisingly hard to get a dark theme right).
- Nice recent kernels, which can be installed graphically.
- I really like the "MX Snapshot" utility. I make full system backups to an external SSD drive, and they are tiny when done, like only 4 or 5 GB! Well Done!!
- In order to allow installation of snaps, I did have to set up the default of booting to systemd, which was done using the MX "Boot Options" tool. Once snapd was installed and working, I installed several snaps, such as obs-studio, wire, ffmpeg, mattermost (client) and electron-mail.