MX Linux 19.1
Ugly duckling isn’t how Mayank Sharma would ever describe the distro, but that’s exactly what the developers have named their latest release.
Ugly duckling isn’t how Mayank Sharma would ever describe this distro, but that’s exactly what the developers have named their latest release!
The MX Linux project is the spiritual continuation of the MEPIS distro that leverages the works of the antix project. MX has cleverly remixed components from both projects and has taken some smart decisions to come up with a distro that’s as usable on a decade-old machine as it is on offthe-shelf hardware.
MX ships as an installable live environment and uses a customised
Xfce desktop that looks spiffy and performs adequately even on resource-strapped machines. Its clean desktop is missing any of the usual desktop icons but displays basic system information via an attractive Conky display. Also by default, the Xfce panel is pinned to the left side of the screen and utilises the Whisker applications menu.
MX boots to a welcome screen that contains useful links to common tweaks and the project’s set of custom tools. It also includes a detailed 181-page user manual along with pointers to other avenues of help and support, including forums and videos on the project’s website.
The distro is one of the very few independent projects that uses a custom installer instead of borrowing one from its parent distro or adapting the distro-agnostic
Calamares installer. MX’S installer is verbose enough to handhold inexperienced users through each step, and its reasonable defaults will also make installation pretty straightforward. However, it lacks a partitioner and calls upon Gparted if you want to share the disk with another distro or OS.
Knowledgeable users will appreciate the option to control the services that start during boot. One of the reasons that makes it popular with Linux veterans is its stance of sticking with sysvinit instead of switching over to
systemd. The distro does include systemd in order to allow some apps to run, but it is not enabled by default.
Tinker tinker
Inside the installation, MX’S default collection of apps doesn’t disappoint, as the distro includes everything to fulfil the requirements of a typical desktop user, including a handful of games. MX is built on the current Debian 10 stable release, but updates a lot of apps and backports newer versions from Debian Testing. The only downside of this arrangement is that, unlike a rolling-release distro, you’ll have to do a fresh install when the distro switches to a new Debian stable release.
With this latest release the distro is dropping the antix repositories and moving all the antix packages into their own repos. This new arrangement enables both antix and MX to work on the packages and customise them on their own terms. Talking of repos, MX has also recently introduced the Advanced Hardware Support (AHS) repository that holds new graphics stack and firmware in a bid to support newer graphics hardware.
You can use the repo by enabling it from the distro’s custom repository management tool. The distro includes over a dozen other custom tools. The tools are designed to help users manage their installation, and you can find them all inside the MX Tools dashboard. There’s a codecs downloader, a boot-repair tool, a utility to tweak Conky,a
Live USB creator, and several others. Our favourite’s the snapshot tool that helps make bootable ISO images of your current installation for easy distribution.
Package management is handled by a custom tool as well, which is again designed to take the pain out of searching and installing apps. The distro takes a pragmatic view and offers several popular proprietary apps in the mix as well. You can also browse and install
Flatpaks from their flathub repository right from this utility. If you don’t want the shenanigans, MX also ships the Synaptic package manager.