mx linux is a distro
which is the result of a cooperative
venture
between the anti-x and the mx linux
communities
it's considered a midweight distro it's
not
super light but it's also not supposed
to be that bloated
and it's considered incredibly stable
and it comes with a lot of tools out of
the box
it's supposed to be very good for
beginners and
what actually got me interested in
taking a look at this
is that it is the top ranked distro
on distro watch at least as far as the
number of ratings go obviously it
doesn't have the
highest number rating but out of all of
the people that
decided to vote on distro watch mx linux
is at the top of the pile
so it makes sense to take a look at it
because if you're somebody
who doesn't really know anything about
linux you're kind of thinking of dipping
your toe into the linux pool
it's more than likely that you would
go to a search engine like google and
look up what is the best linux distro
and if you end up coming to
distrowatch.com
obviously this is the one that they are
recommending
so we're gonna fire it up in virtualbox
and see how we feel about it
so we're going to create a new machine
here we're going to call it
mx linux and
for the type we're just going to leave
it as this
generic linux here we're i'm gonna go
ahead and give it
four gigs of ram shouldn't really need
too much considering that it's just a
mid-weight distro uh which in the linux
world you gotta keep in mind that
mid-weight still means
much much lighter than windows or even
the mac os
we'll create the virtual hard disk leave
it as vdi
fixed size to get slightly better
performance
we'll crank this up to 30 gigs
we'll create our virtual hard disk and
we'll just go in the
into the settings and make a couple
other changes so we'll crank up our
video memory
we'll do vbox vga so that we can have
full screen
we'll add two processors
and we'll go into our virtual
cd drive here and then we'll go ahead
and insert mx linux
there we go and we'll go ahead and start
our machine up
so right off the bat the view
is very different it's kind of
minimalist in a way like the um this
menu here
obviously doesn't have a whole lot of
graphics work put into it but it's not
uh it's not truly minimalist it's not
just a boring
uh grub screen it's kind of in between
you know
mid weight as it says
and as always the instructions here for
installing whether you're going to be
doing it in a virtual machine or whether
you're going to be doing it to hardware
are pretty much the same the only real
difference is obviously with hardware
you're going to be
booted from a usb drive
so you would have to flash it to a usb
drive first
so this is the welcome screen that we
get that we get again
not a whole lot of graphical work put
into this
it's just a mid-weight type of look
so we'll just close out of this and go
ahead and run the installer
and we'll take a look at it once it's
installing so
hit next you can go ahead and do
a manual partition or you can just
automatically
install using the entire disk you also
have an option here to go ahead and
encrypt the disk so we typically see
this with distros
like linux mint where we're setting them
up we just have all the gui setup no
need to
enter a bunch of commands like we would
with arch or gen2
so we'll go ahead and leave those as the
default and then we get another warning
are we sure we want to format the disk
uh so i'm going to be using mbr since um
i'm just use doing a regular virtual box
installation
um we'll go ahead and leave that
as our system boot disk and we'll also
install grub
for linux and windows even though we
obviously won't be booting windows from
this virtual install here
so we have computer name yeah we'll
leave that as mx i'm going to change the
joe name to
mx box and work group can be work group
yeah sure
all right so we get um one of the things
that i actually kind of
like about mx linux here is
with our clock it automatically defaults
to the am pm clock uh so
a lot of distros these days they give
you the option when you're doing this
gui setup to choose
uh which clock that you want well some
do and some don't honestly i can't
remember whether or not mint does it's
been a while since i've had to install
it
um but this is something that i do enjoy
because
a lot of the time they'll just default
to a 24-hour clock and then you have to
go change it after the fact
mx actually gives you this option during
the setup so i like that
and then you can change your service
settings here
so if you uh don't have a printer for
example
you might want to disable cups just to
make it a little bit more minimalist not
having
services that you obviously can't use
same thing with bluetooth a lot of
people don't really use bluetooth
on their laptops or desktops that's
something that you might want to go
ahead and disable
but i'm just going to leave everything
as it is
all right and then we set up our user
info so we'll make it kenny
and set up the password and of course it
blanks it out as
all distro should so far the only disk
i've seen that does this nonsense is
clover os where it actually shows your
password
and then we'll set up our root password
as well and we're not going to do
auto login or anything like that
so we're gonna hit next and then we just
have to wait for the installation to
finish
all right and the install is finished is
actually pretty quick i've only
had the video paused for about two
minutes
so that's really good installs quickly
like most binary distros do
and we'll go ahead and do the automatic
reboot i selected
vbox vga so we should be able
to get full screen on auto reboot um
it doesn't then obviously i'm gonna have
to go in and change some settings to try
to get it to full screen again
we didn't get full screen during the
installation so that's a little
that's a little bit disappointing
all right so we'll go ahead and load it
up
and i really like how the graphical
loading screens and everything are so
far i mean it's just
you know it's not super fancy like you
would see with kde
um this is xfce by the way there are um
there is a kde variant of uh
of um mx linux i can show you again on
the browser window
but xfce is the default one that you
would download
all right so then this is what we have
we have this startup screen that you
would get
again similar to linux mint but this is
very helpful with these
sort of beginner distros or just really
easy to use distros right you want to
have some help that comes up
so that the person knows what they want
to get into
um so one interesting thing about this
probably one of the
couple of the first things that you
might have noticed is uh this over here
now if you're not familiar with what
this is over here it's called
conkey which is basically a system
monitor
status monitor and as you can see it
gives us a little bit of information
gives us the date gives us the time
gives us
some system stats here so we have the
hard disk
memory and cpu we can see the percentage
that the hard disk is full and
how much memory and cpu that we're using
so this is good it's something that
people like to look at you know a little
bit eye candy
um it might be considered a little bit
outdated i don't think that conkey
is really that popular these days i
remember
back around uh maybe 2013
2014 i think is when it was a little bit
bigger
everybody wanted to have conkey running
on their desktop
a lot of people would consider it bloat
but again we want to
judge this distro within the context of
who it's meant for right i mean if
you're trying to be
super lean super minimalist this
probably isn't going to be the distro
for you you'd want to stick to something
like
arch arctics gentoo those sort of
do-it-yourself distros
um the other thing that you might have
noticed is that
the panel here is on the side
uh so this is pretty interesting usually
i like to have my panel
um down at the bottom if i'm gonna be
using a panel that is
i'd like to have it down at the bottom
just because that's
how windows was you know i my first disc
joe i've mentioned it a few times that i
used as a daily driver was linux mint
um i tried umbuntu for a bit that's
really truly the first distro i used but
i didn't really stick with it because i
just didn't like the layout meant
sort of copied the windows layout to a
bit but didn't take any of the suck with
it
and i enjoyed it um i have a few family
members
that use windows but they have it set up
like this
where the um bar is over on the left
hand side
and i really think that they might
actually enjoy
this type of setup in mx linux of course
you could do this in
linux mint basically any other distro
that has a bar
but it's something that you have to
manually set up and
you know when we have these sort of easy
to use distros we don't want the end
user to have to configure
too much we want them to just be able to
boot it up and go
like they would with um well not so much
like they would with windows because
obviously there's a lot of extra you'd
have to do with windows
um so we have typical xfce so we have
dunarm as our file manager all the
regular tools we would get with that
now one thing that i mentioned is that
uh
mx linux is considered a very stable
distro so it's not going to be bleeding
edge
like if we look at um what kernel we're
running on here we're running kernel
version 4.19
so this is considered a
stable long-term release
okay so this is obviously not 5.9 or i
think 5.8
is one of the latest stable ones this is
the long term so it's going to not
really get
a lot of updates to it besides just bug
fixes
and security fixes and then it's going
to be supported
for a few years usually you would see
a distro like this used in like a
corporate environment where they don't
necessarily need
the latest and greatest they just want
things to work
and we'll see that with some of the
other software that's on here
of course we have python most linux
distro ship with python
we have an older version on here 3.7.3
from last year if we look at um
gcc for example so we're running an
older version of gcc
from 2018 version 8.3
but again all of these versions of
software are going to be very very
stable
so let's take a look at our task manager
real quick
um mx linux ships with
h-top which of course is my favorite
task manager so really good
that they include that and again it's
fairly lightweight
we're only using about 486
megabytes of memory much lighter than
you would see with something like
windows we'd be using at least two gigs
if we were on windows
um there's a little bit that i guess
would be considered bloat i mean you've
got
conkey but within the context
of this particular distro i wouldn't
really consider that bloat
of course we have firefox as our default
web browser generally we would see that
in linux distros and let's see which
version
of firefox we're running here okay so
it's a little bit of an older version
we're running version
76.0.1 let's see
if an update to that is available
over in the updates we do have 162 new
updates
and let's see yeah so we do have the
update for firefox version 80.
now one thing uh that is a bit of a
downside
to this distro so you'll notice here
with our updater we don't really have
a modules a modular setup here where we
can
kind of pick and choose using a gui
which
which applications we want to update and
which applications we want to hold back
this is kind of a big deal for people
that are
going to be a bit more pickier with
their software getting into
uh not necessarily a power user but sort
of on their way to becoming a power user
uh which
obviously people who are using linux at
distro that
or a um operating system rather that
actually gives you
uh freedom to do what you want right
good news linux you're probably going to
start becoming a power user because you
actually have the power to do so
so this is a real knock i you know you
might
uh you might not like how
firefox looks with the different address
bar past i think
version 77 is when they implemented that
so if you wanted to hold it back
it's going to be a bit tougher to do on
mx linux so that's not
a really good thing that's going on
there let's take a look at some of the
other
software that we have
i want to go into
see the settings manager
okay so we've got um actually some
software in here
that's a little bit different we've got
adobe flash player
um i don't even i can't even really
think
what you would need adobe flash player
for these days i don't
think i've used adobe flash player in
years
so that's a little bit interesting we
have an ad block
which um i want to see what this is all
about you would think that you would
just have
the anti-x ad or blocker
oh okay so it's in etsy host so this is
going to automatically block ads
in any browser that you're using that's
actually pretty useful
that this is included yeah i wonder if
that really does work better than
something like u-block origin i might
have to try to go to a site that's known
for having a lot of ads
and see if it's a little bit calmer um
so this i device mounter is pretty
interesting so i did a little bit of
research into this because
i don't have any type of eye devices to
use with it
so it's not something that i can
actually benefit from
but when i think about this for a little
bit
it's something that i bet a lot of
people who are using linux
probably have no need for um
essentially what this does is it allows
you to mount an ios file system to your
linux box so that would be something
like an
ipad an iphone basically any type of i
anything is going to run ios but it lets
you mount it the same way that
you would be able to mount an android
device or an mp3 player where you can
actually browse through the file system
but the problem with idevice mounter is
that
it doesn't really work with phones
that are running ios version 5 or higher
which is pretty much every phone i mean
i think ios 5 came out with the iphone
4 so if you have an iphone 5
or newer you're not really going to be
able to
mount your idevice with this
now there is software that exists on
linux which will
let work with phones that are running
newer ones i believe ifuse
is a name of them so this i device
mounter
i actually do consider this bloat even
within the context of this distro
again i wouldn't call conkey or i
wouldn't call um
like there's games that come on here i
wouldn't quite consider those bloke
because
it at least is something that you might
benefit from you know conkey you get
a little bit of eye candy games you get
you know
games that somebody might play but this
i device
mounter i don't think most linux users
are really using iphones anyway
and if they were they certainly would
not be using
uh something as old as an iphone 4. i
don't even think apple supports the
iphone 4 so i don't even know where you
would get that maybe on ebay
for really cheap but again i don't think
and
let me know if you do actually have an
iphone 4 and you actually
would benefit from using idevice mounter
maybe there are a couple people out
there
all right so i just bookmarked a couple
of sites to
test the ad blocking of this with uh so
like we have this one
here
so this is the type of you know article
site obviously where we would expect to
see a bunch of ads
um so far it oh okay
there it is so we get this uh
pop-up ad that just comes up for both
galaxy buds and blue cross blue shield
so we
actually have ads on top of ads doesn't
look like the ad blocker worked very
good there
um we could take a look at yeah so we
have ones loading on the side we can
take a look at forbes
they're pretty notorious for having a
bunch of ads
so yeah we got one that loaded at the
top there
so i don't think that this um that this
method of ad blocking really works maybe
it's just
empty as it was talking about etsy host
um okay so let's see let's take a look
yeah we don't really have anything in
here so
that uh almost seems like it's
not so much misleading but something
that uh someone might not
necessarily understand i mean even i was
thinking that there's ad blocking built
into
the system which i guess it is but it
needs to be set up and configured
and i think that this would be more
difficult for a beginner to do
um than just using like ublock origin so
that's another piece of software that
i'm going to say isn't very useful at
least for someone who's going to be a
beginner
so if we go into the menu here obviously
there's many more applications so you've
got
all the office stuff libreoffice of
course
is um what they include with it and
you've got all of the different tools
there
development you've got genie probably
the most common
ide that they bundle with these systems
um i don't know why i guess genie is
really popular but i've
never really known anybody that actually
really uses genie as their id um
we've got a film dial-up tool i don't
think i've ever done used that before
that's interesting we've got um
transmission
as our torrenting application we got
thunderbird as our mail client
both really solid applications um of
course we've got
these games that come installed with it
so uh yeah same kind of stuff that you
would see if
you were um used to using windows right
they come with a couple little games
uh so overall what do i think about
anti-x
i think it's pretty good as a i mean not
anti-x
mx linux that's the disto we're looking
at i think it's pretty good
for a beginner distro but i've got to
say
i still like linux mint better i could
see
somebody really enjoying this if they
just like the panel being over to the
side
and if they uh really like conkey
but once they learn that you can just
move the panel over to the side
in a distro like linux mint and once you
can just install
conkey then i think that they would
still get more benefit
out of mint also you've got the mint
forums which
are very helpful if you ever get stuck
on something
i've never been directed to any type of
mx linux
forums for any type of issue that i've
ever had on linux i've used
arch forums gen 2 forums ubuntu
linux mint never mx linux says so
i think that uh the rating that it has
on
distro watch might be a little bit
higher than it should be maybe there's
just a lot of people that are using it
in corporations
that are rating it because of the
stability that you get
but even then i would think that debian
would be more preferred in a corporate
environment every corporate environment
i've worked at
that uses linux it's always been either
debian or
red hat that we've used we've never used
something like mx linux or even linux
mint for that matter
let me know in the comments down below
what you think if you've used mx linux
what did you think about it
do you think it's a better beginner
distro than mint
do you think it's a better corporate
distro than debian or red hat
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