Personal impressions on MX-Linux 17

[dolphin_oracle]

we do try to make Xfce look nice.

just take a look at screenshots of mx14 to see the progress! Lordy was it an ugly child!

[richb]

we do try to make Xfce look nice.

just take a look at screenshots of mx14 to see the progress! Lordy was it an ugly child!

Indeed. I interpret UI and appearance as two different things. UI is how the user interacts with the system, appearance is how it looks. In addition to the concentration on UI a lot of effort has gone into making MX look good. There is an Art Team that focuses on this with input from devs and all users.

[vince_ita]

Very comprehensive answers! Thanks guys!

[rokytnji.1]

How is this for a UI on a Chromebook? Looks pretty much also stock to what was replaced by google. Being a Arch user. You should recognise it. It is not MX. But a X is in there.

viewtopic.php?p=437475#p437475

[KBD]

Love that Xfce just gets out of your way and allows you to do what you need. Wouldn't change a thing. MX is great. Xfce is perfect for it.

[Stevo]

Future versions will be using XFCE-4.14, whenever that gets finished, so there will no doubt be changes in the look due to the switch to GTK 3.

[g33zr]

I have an aging System76 Pangolin laptop, which even with a new battery, only gets ca. 3 hrs. of battery life max. So I tried a few "lite" linux distros that feature lxde and openbox. Unfortunately, I didn't like how they looked or functioned; I also didn't notice much improvement with RAM once I installed my favorite apps. I've had good luck with xfce in the past, so I decided to check out MX-Linux 17.

Once I installed it as well as my usual software, I restored my files, settings, etc. from my backup drive and couldn't believe that everything ran just the way I prefer--right out of the box. MX-Linux 17 boots fast and runs better and quicker than most other distros I've tried.

Many thanks to the devs and others who contributed to MX-Linux 17. It's a keeper!

[Jerry3904]

Thanks for the good words! Could you click on Start menu > Quick System Info and post the output (it copies automatically) so we can see the system? Always like to know what it's running on...

[dreamer]

Future versions will be using XFCE-4.14, whenever that gets finished, so there will no doubt be changes in the look due to the switch to GTK 3.

If we assume XFCE will transition as MATE did there will no doubt be regressions porting from GTK 2 to GTK 3. Some applets will not make it. GTK 3 color picker is a complete mess. Scrollbars will autohide. GTK 3 draws black squares before the application is shown (but apparently I'm the only one experiencing this). That said, much is already GTK 3. Maybe XFCE devs are doing the right thing and taking it slow. There is no point in releasing XFCE GTK 3 just to say "Look we did it", much better to port one thing at a time and make sure it's up to XFCE standards. I think that's what they are doing and since I like GTK 2 it can't go slow enough. If I were superrich I would fund a QT5 port of XFCE. I wonder how many millions that would cost. Judging from LXQT it's no easy thing to do. A QT desktop that isn't KDE is kind of needed to keep the balance in the Force.

[BitJam]

Sorry I'm late to the party!

[...] how is the revenue generated if not via contributions and donations?

AFAIK our devs don't get paid. I don't think we would last long if they did. Maybe less than a week.

As for Elementary OS. Every distro has a different focus. Their focus is clearly on looks and mimicking the look and feel of Macs and Windows. I think they did a great job!

1) IMO, our primary focus is to build on top of Debian Stable which is usually very very stable and somewhat out of date. Then we backport tons of packages from Debian Testing and put them in our community repo. IMO this is the greatest added value we provide because our users get a great combination of stability and recent versions of programs. I think there is a forum here for requests to have packages backported. If you want a more up-to-date version of some package, just place a post there.

2) Our second consideration (at least when we started) was to be light enough to run well on netbooks. IIRC this was the primary itch and the creation of MX let the team of back-porters from Mepis to get back to work on a maintained distro.

3) In addition, we use the build system and the live system from antiX. This helped us replace the Mepis lead dev who left for greener pastures. The live system is touted to be: The Most Extensive Live-usb on the Planet!. I would characterize it as the best live-usb on Planet Earth. I am probably biased but I still think it is true by a large margin.

Points (2) and (3) mesh well. MX is not as lightweight as antiX but it is still lightweight-ish and IMO is much lighter than Mepis (due to XFCE vs. KDE). We are probably lighter than Elementary because it is based on Ubuntu and Gnome. I'd say MX is a hybrid or combination of a heavy-ish distro and the very light antiX.

If looks are your top priority (as it seems to be for some reviewers) then you shouldn't choose MX. If you are looking for something reasonable light that is more "user friendly" (GUI-oriented) than antiX and has great stability combined with recent versions of many programs then you are right in our sweet spot. Likewise if you are looking for something "user friendly" that you can run live then you are also in another one of our sweet spots.

Our live system has an extensive list of features. A long time user the the Knoppix live distro (one of the first ever live distros and the starting point for our live system) switched to live MX-14.3 back in late 2014 or early 2015. MX live has been his main system ever since. But even he was not aware of some of our key features such as the automatic frugal install which has to be the fastest installation of a main-stream Linux distro by a wide margin. Here it takes about 20 or 30 seconds. I would stretch it to about a minute if you want to ponder the 3 questions we ask you (what existing partition to install to, what size to make the root persistence file, and what size to make the home persistence file).