MX Linux Forum

@ richb
Thanks for your response !!
I wish things to evolve according to the wishes and the plans of the MX team.
Best regards !

Pierre wrote:"One of the few areas where I think MX loses out to the big, mainstream Linux distributions is in beginner friendliness".
- it's still a fairly beginner / friendliness Linux System - as far as I'm concerned, though.

Agreed, but I think the most important feature for a "beginner friendly" distro is everything (at least everything the beginner cares about) must work right out of the box. MX has this feature in spades! GNU/Linux beginners aren't going to be successful searching online bug reports, editing grub or configurations files in terminal, starting and stopping systems processes, etc..

Reviews aside, I like watching MX climb in the Distrowatch user rankings:
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=ranking

Not including IPFire (a dedicated firewall rather than a general purpose GNU/Linux distro), MX is now #2 and the latest buzz may give it the boost it needs to reach the top of list.

This review seems reasonably positive and objective to me; however, I don't recall
any published review that grasps the unique and distinctive features of MX to create
derivative LiveUSBs with selective persistence, making iso-snapshots, iso-remastering
and kernel replacement.

This review only notes these as options on the MX-Tools GUI, without any significant
recognition of the remarkable infrastructure that these options represent.

TJ Hoye wrote:This review seems reasonably positive and objective to me; however, I don't recall
any published review that grasps the unique and distinctive features of MX to create
derivative LiveUSBs with selective persistence, making iso-snapshots, iso-remastering
and kernel replacement.

Probably because Jessee doesn't know what that stuff is, and/or has no use for it.

TJ Hoye wrote:This review seems reasonably positive and objective to me; however, I don't recall
any published review that grasps the unique and distinctive features of MX to create
derivative LiveUSBs with selective persistence, making iso-snapshots, iso-remastering
and kernel replacement.

Not quite true. antiX has these features

[conveys] the unique and distinctive features of MX to create derivative LiveUSBs with selective persistence... and live-usb-maker

I can't fault a distrohopping reviewer for skimping on the details. Even across the the cumulative d_o tutorial videos, only selective details are covered. Personally, I'm inclined to lobby for a feature freeze until completion of a comprehensive and up-to-date set of relevant documentation is achieved.

One newly-added live-usb-maker feature "Update UUIDs on an existing live-usb"
...I (seriously) have no idea why, or when, one would want/need to utilize that feature.

Developer (and helper/supporter) resources are continually stretched thin, and documentation never catches up because attention is spent chasing and supporting further edge cases.
Why are /home/demo/Live-usb-storage permissions root:root?
I'm dismayed by this scenario wherein we're unable to readily provide a definitive answer to the inquiry. At the same time, I'm wondering "How did we arrive here? How 'valid' is the perceived edge case which inspired Live-usb-Storage in the first place?" Legacy bios + single fixed drive w/ mbr + dualboot... and the machine lacks a second usb port (to host user's choice-of-format extra storage partition)??? Because "speed"? Naw. if a machine has only usb2 support, and its fixed drive is not a SATA1 5400rpm laggard, and user chooses to employ static persistence... well, choices have trade-offs.

A similar point of wonderment:
blab ~= blabel
How did we arrive at (needing to remember, and to document) redundant pairs of persistence-related bootline parameters???
Because once upon a time... total bootline length was to limited to 256 chars? (now is 4096 chars?)
Because... eternal backwards compatibility?

skidoo wrote:Personally, I'm inclined to lobby for a feature freeze until completion of a comprehensive and up-to-date set of relevant documentation is achieved.

Agree 100%. I would perhaps add the suggestion to instigate a process to rigorously identify and squash bugs before adding new code with potentially new bugs.

Under Windows (I do not know yet enough about MX to say the same about that) I have since at least 2014 adopted a strategy of version-freezing ALL software I use. There are now only three valid reasons to update an application to a newer version: 1) important security fixes (most often); 2) a bug is removed that is actively annoying me (rare); 3) a newer version has a feature that I definitely need (even rarer). In my experience (YMMV) practically all the applications I use are more than good enough for my purposes (for instance I am still using a couple valid MS Office licenses from 2003 and there is zilch reason for me to change that) and have been that for quite a while. About the only app I regularly updated (other than browser, the Adobe crap etc) was a sandbox utility. And VirtualBox.

Most stuff I use has been around for many years (foobar2000, vlc, IrfanView...) and these programs are mature, stable applications. No need to tinker (again YMMV).

IMHO, updating software (other than for security fixes) is a vastly overrated pleasure.

I don't make full use of all the MX live USB tools, but wouldn't the new features have been there to be tested in the alphas and betas of MX17?

I'm belatedly catching up with some forum posts. Still a newcomer to MX and using MX-16. But I'd pick up and agree with RichB's comment on the MX-17 review:

richb wrote:Very thorough and positive. I wish he had mentioned the manual where a beginner can learn about the concepts that he indicated made MX somewhat less beginner friendly.

As a definite newbie I have found MX extremely user-friendly. I'd definitely endorse the value of the manual. The best user-guide to any of the half-dozen or so Linux distros I have tried. Clear, comprehensive and easy to navigate and understand. Linux Lite's equivalent is not bad, but the MX one is definitely the best I've seen.

While I'm handing out bouquets, let me add that MX (version 16.1, anyway!) offers the best "out-of-the box" experience I've had. With PCLinuxOS I had problems over Broadcom wifi. With various Ubuntu derivatives (Lite and others) Bluetooth hasn't always played nicely. So far, MX-16 has performed brilliantly. MXTools is helpful for non-experts. And the options (not easy or not available in many other distros) to run from USB or SD card, and to remaster (which I haven't yet tried) are extras which set MX apart. I can't understand why MX isn't a lot higher up the popularity charts.....