Suggestions on improving MX
Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2018 5:29 pm
Hello everyone.
MX is a very good distro nowadays but I still have a few pretty major wishes for improvement.
Please take them as constructive criticism from a user who would like to have strong alternative to the "well-known-Debian-fork".
1) Stick to the latest LTS kernel (for security and hardware support)
(It's sad to know that MX16 was with backported kernel 4.7 for the whole life-cycle)
Some Debian users want to have stable secure system which works well on modern hardware. They're forced to use backports but this solution has a few flaws: you sacrifice security patches, it's never-ending process. I quite like Canonical's approach (supported point releases with updated kernel, Mesa, xOrg) but the problem is that they have non-LTS, so they reach End-of-life, the have to maintain themselves (not an option for MX I presume). Mageia's approach sounds great to me - jump to kernel 4.14 and updgrade Mesa for latest hardware support, monitor & patch security issues. That (at least partly, with kernel) I'd like to see in MX.
Idea: take latest backported Debian kernel (with config and patches), apply upstream kernel updates, maintain kernel this way as long as possible.
(go even further with) Optimized kernel (branch): all above + CK & BFQ patchset (I can update that instruction for current BFQ-SQ if you're interested)
Actually I wouldn't mind maintaining such kernel but I'm not a coder (to fix possible FTBFS with patches) and can't package properly.
2) Apply patch to xorg-core to allow combinations with Ctrl+Shift when it's binded to keyboard switching shortcut
3) Make LibreOffice Standard Filter resizeable (simple config edit)
4) Disable NetworkManager MAC address randomizer (simple config edit)
5) Get rid of some Thunar custom actions.
Some custom action (such as "Ownership to user/root") are useless for most users and could be dangerous for newbies. Besides, they complement the "wall of menu items". This "wall" wouldn't be that big and confusing with KDE-like cascade menus but unfortunately it's impossible (hard?) to group them in Thunar. So I'd just leave only important ones (Catfish, Terminal).
Sorry for my English and hope that at least something of this will help you to make MX better.
MX is a very good distro nowadays but I still have a few pretty major wishes for improvement.
Please take them as constructive criticism from a user who would like to have strong alternative to the "well-known-Debian-fork".
1) Stick to the latest LTS kernel (for security and hardware support)
(It's sad to know that MX16 was with backported kernel 4.7 for the whole life-cycle)
Some Debian users want to have stable secure system which works well on modern hardware. They're forced to use backports but this solution has a few flaws: you sacrifice security patches, it's never-ending process. I quite like Canonical's approach (supported point releases with updated kernel, Mesa, xOrg) but the problem is that they have non-LTS, so they reach End-of-life, the have to maintain themselves (not an option for MX I presume). Mageia's approach sounds great to me - jump to kernel 4.14 and updgrade Mesa for latest hardware support, monitor & patch security issues. That (at least partly, with kernel) I'd like to see in MX.
Idea: take latest backported Debian kernel (with config and patches), apply upstream kernel updates, maintain kernel this way as long as possible.
(go even further with) Optimized kernel (branch): all above + CK & BFQ patchset (I can update that instruction for current BFQ-SQ if you're interested)
Actually I wouldn't mind maintaining such kernel but I'm not a coder (to fix possible FTBFS with patches) and can't package properly.
2) Apply patch to xorg-core to allow combinations with Ctrl+Shift when it's binded to keyboard switching shortcut
3) Make LibreOffice Standard Filter resizeable (simple config edit)
4) Disable NetworkManager MAC address randomizer (simple config edit)
5) Get rid of some Thunar custom actions.
Some custom action (such as "Ownership to user/root") are useless for most users and could be dangerous for newbies. Besides, they complement the "wall of menu items". This "wall" wouldn't be that big and confusing with KDE-like cascade menus but unfortunately it's impossible (hard?) to group them in Thunar. So I'd just leave only important ones (Catfish, Terminal).
Sorry for my English and hope that at least something of this will help you to make MX better.