Dell Inspiron 1545 - No Problems

[Stevie 57]

Ok, first post, so here we go. I'm not completely new to Linux, but I would still only rate myself as 2 or 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. Started trying a few distros about 18 months ago, and eventually settled on Mint. Happy with it until few weeks ago when I decided to install the latest version, Mint 20.2. Had a number of issues that I hadn't had before, and although the problems could no doubt have been resolved I decided to have a look round for an alternative.

Tried MX 19 in live mode first, happy with it so installed it, no problems whatsoever. There are 3 main reasons I was impressed, as follows:

1) This Dell laptop has one of those awkward Broadcom wifi cards, that are known to be troublesome with some distros, as I've found out. No such issue with MX, recognised the wifi straight away and once I'd entered password it connected immediately.

2) Not sure if the screen is getting towards the end of it's life, but with any distro it always looks a bit dark compared to my other laptops. I had already confirmed the backlight was set at max, so did some research into how I could compensate. Well, this looked like being a mammoth task in a lot of cases, but not so in MX. Found the sysbrightness in MX Tweaks, couple of clicks of the mouse, and all done.

3) When I try something out in live mode I obviously set language, keyboard and connect to internet. May change one or two other things to suit my personal preferences. Then when I come to install it I usually have to make all these settings all over again. How pleased I was to find that with MX all my settings could be carried forward to the installation. Such an obvious option I think all distros should do it.

I'm also running MX on an Acer Travelmate B113 netbook, and haven't had any problems with that either. As it's a relatively under powered little thing I was planning on running a lightweight distro on it, but I wasn't entirely happy with anything I tried, so gave MX a go. Runs ok providing I don't try and do too many things at once. Not a problem for me, I've always been a "one thing at a time" type of person.

In a nutshell, everything works on both the Dell and the Acer, and I've had no issues with either the installation or using it. Definitely ticks the box for "suitable for beginners". Finally, congratulations on keeping the 32 bit flag flying, especially considering how many distros have abandoned it.