MX Linux

Reader supplied reviews for MX Linux Average rating 8.0 from 680 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on MX Linux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 23.621.319.418.317.116.1 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 23.6 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-04-23 Votes: 11 MX Linux is a beautiful balance between control and user friendliness that I've never seen in a linux distro before, I'm not a great programmer or linux user by any means but many distros always feel like they are focused on one of those two traits entirely and so they either end up missing features or packing in way too many needless features, but MX Linux seems to be running pretty fast and stable while having lots of decently accessible customization, builtin utilities, and easily interpreted documentation. Its not as simple as something like ubuntu but I think if you're on this website reading this your probably more than capable of handling it because its certainly easier than something like a base debian install even with a preinstalled Desktop Environment. One of the cool features is the mx package manager because it allows you to install packages from a few different repositories like debian-testing and once its done installing it'll automatically disable the repo so if you install with a different method you don't have to manually update the sources list. I tried both the kde and xfce version and personally i prefer the kde version because it looks a little nicer but the fact they support/maintain the xfce version is awsome aswell for older hardware where ever bit of resource usage. I think these people deserve all the support and and encouragement they can get and hope they stick to their curent philosophy unlike some other big linux distros because its been very relieving to finally find that balance between function and form :) Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 23.6 Rating: 8 Date: 2025-04-18 Votes: 2 Just tried 32 bit versions, main Xfce and fluxbox. I'm very impressed with Xfce , looks promising, lot of tools, htop shows around 460mb of ram after live session boots. With that left side panel looks bit like Ubuntu, nice conky monitor design, powerful aps out of the box. That's for the Xfce. Fluxbox edition is bad, needs lot of work and I recommend to look at Sparky minimal and take some inspiration there - much better lightweight distro based on Debian - MX fluxbox is using lot of apps written for different desktops and that makes it heavy. Can imagine using this distro with Xfce as daily. But my potato 2005 Acer needs lightweight system and that's why I'm staying with sparky minimal. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 23.6 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-04-16 Votes: 31 MX Linux is a solid desktop Linux distro for those wanting something from the Debian family but with more utilities and newer kernels and better hardware support than stock Debian stable. For new Linux users coming from Windows I would say it is suitable for those with more technical knowledge and experience of using computers, and operating systems such as DOS, as it does require more typing at the command line interface than say Linux Mint, which i would say is better for those who are less experienced at computing as it has better GUI tools. For users coming from Windows, it also requires more tinkering after installing to get it to look and behave more like the Windows user interface in order to be familiar and easy to use, than Mint. Watch youtube videos on how to set MX up and customise it after installing. One area in which it is better than Mint is in the Linux kernels available for it in the MX Linux repositories. These are newer and may afford better support for newer hardware than those in Mint, including the Debian edition of Mint. For example, MX Linux lets me use my Intel AX200 wifi card whereas LMDE (and also stock Debian) does not support it. MX Linux currently has a version 6.14 Linux kernel available, whereas Mint is still stuck at 6.11 . MX Linux also has newer kernels that have security fixes for known vulnerabilities (eg. CVE-2024-53150 and CVE-2024-53197 which are used by authoritarian regimes to hack devices of journalists and civil society members) whereas Ubuntu LTS and Linux Mint lag behind in this area (as of April 2025 still no safe kernels in those distros). One of the strengths of MX is the set of utilities it comes with. It has useful utilities for deleting unnecessary files to free up more disk space, for tweaking the user interface, and so on. The flagship edition of MX uses Xfce desktop environment and this is the version I like best as it comes with a very good set of utilities such as the Xfce screenshot app which is one of the best I have used, and Xfce very easy to customise. Xfce is also relatively light on system resources like RAM. Other editions include a KDE edition (which will use more RAM than Xfce and in my opinion offers no significant advantage over Xfce to make up for this), and one using Fluxbox (lighter on system resources than Xfce but possibly less user friendly also). If you have an old computer with a slower CPU and less RAM, I would recommend MX Linux's sister distro AntiX instead of the fluxbox edition of MX, as it is designed for that use case with smaller kernels and so on. I would say MX is best for computers built during the last 15 years with at least 4 GB of RAM to the hardware made in the last year. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 680 reader reviews of MX Linux...