Review:MX Linux MX-17 Horizon -2nd test, top notch, by Dedoimedo

[nanoSYS]

MX-17 - Second test review by Dedoimedo

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/mx-17-lenovo.html

(...) top notch.

Good distros are far and few in between, and MX-17 Horizon is truly a magnificent product. Way to go.

[richb]

Nice!

[Paul..]

WOW

[Jerry3904]

That is nice, and it gives us some stuff to think about as we move forward.

[Adrian]

Great!

Just to mention, that Bluetooth error should not have showed up (AFAIK) if he did an upgrade or used the latest MX mothly snapshot.

[Stevo]

He mentioned Firefox 57, too, so he must not have done the upgrades for which we see the notification in the screen. So he also switched to MousePad before giving the newer Featherpad a try.

Be we all know MX 17 is awesome, so the review is not really a surprise, is it?

I wonder what gives us better battery life than similar xfce distros. Do we have tlp on the ISO? Yesterday I added powertop and switched almost all the tunables to "good", per a Phoronix article, and I'll see if that helps battery life even more.

[Adrian]

Do we have tlp on the ISO?

Transient lunar phenomenon? Oh, "TLP is an advanced power management tool for Linux." Yes, it shows as 0.9-3 on the MX-17 release ISO.

[Stevo]

Yes, a lot of people have reported tlp helps with power consumption with just its default settings--depending on the hardware, of course.

[dolphin_oracle]

wow, and he even liked featherpad.

Whoops he was talking about mousepad?

[asqwerth]

Wow, good review.

I can understand why he used the original iso again though, since he wanted to compare like with like, ie install the same iso on 2 different computers and see how it worked OOTB.

I was puzzled by the text editor thing though. He was referring to mousepad as if that came with the iso.

With respect to battery consumption, it could be the antiX magic (yay to anticapitalista and his special sauce!) since we know how resource efficient antiX is, ie in cpu and ram usage. Maybe resource efficiency does affect battery consumption to some extent?

Also he might be comparing it to Ubuntu-based xfce distros, for instance Xubuntu, as I think Ubuntu is simply not as efficient or power frugal.

However I'm not sure whether he's compared it against another debian based xfce distribution recently. For all we know results could be similar with SolydX or plain Debian . Any comparison with a Devuan based xfce distro? Could the difference be systemd?

Most crucially IMO, could it be the kernel? Usually newer ones have better power usage.

I can say that I find MX and Manjaro xfce both to have good power consumption on my old and new laptops.

On my new lappy mx16 was installed using a snapshot already running liquorix 4.12. Manjaro (unstable) was running on the latest 4.14 kernel I believe.

Previously when I multi booted lots more on my old lappy, mx14 had much better battery life than the last crunchbang 10 (both wheezy) even though CB used openbox. However the difference was the kernel since CB was on vanilla 3.2 I think, while mx14 had a much newer kernel. Manjaro (stable) at that time had the best battery life on that machine and of course it had the newest kernel of the lot. I believe I installed tlp on all.