I hate MX Linux - Distro Rant
Published: 2020-04-09 03:59:13

I am a distro hopper, but I often have a singularity distribution that I use to keep everything I do stable. For that, I use Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. What's another distribution that bases on Debian? Garbage. Also known as MX Linux. Now, this is a rant, and whether or not my experiences are similar to yours is irrelevant as I want to explain why MX Linux was the worst Linux I ever tried (and I have tried many). Do not take this as a review or reasons against using it yourself, I just had a REALLY bad experience, and it explains why I always say *distro does in fact matter*.

# The good of MX Linux.
I am going to try to pad this, as it is very light, and in all actuality, it is only because I like XFCE. Many of the problems stem from its base, AntiX. Luckily Antix is actually a fairly good distribution in terms of it being 89% stable, where most of that comes from the Debian (STABLE) base. Debian is so stable, it is often used at NASA, Google, etc. XFCE as a desktop is pretty good, I have it as my current desktop while I learn how to package Lumina for Ubuntu Lumina. However, the issue is that not much else can be said. They themed the XFCE panel very well... And that is my highly padded good things list.

# The bad of MX Linux
It is slow, buggy, and borderline unusable on lower-end hardware. Or medium hardware for that matter. For something running on AntiX and Debian, WITH XFCE mind you, you'd think I could get it running on hardware that I use day-to-day. I have 4GB RAM and 2CPU cores. "Oh be nice Kai, that's extraordinarily low-end hardware", but no. My laptop runs Ubuntu with the default GNOME just fine, even so far as to say it is pretty fast compared to MX Linux, at least when I installed it. Heck, I can even play most indie games and some triple-A titles if I am lightweight enough on the desktop, like with XFCE or a WM like Tiny. For no real explainable reason, MX Linux on my machine was laggy, delayed, and over-all just not working. Speaking of not working, I mentioned it being "Buggy". Yes, a lot of it was buggy, no matter what I tried, it was buggy. Discord often never opened, random apps were locked up in processes that made no sense, I had 8 boot loops before sacrificing the extra space to the Ubuntu Lumina project and my main OS. Heck, even system basics like the login screen didn't work. I don't even know the original login screen as I changed it TWELVE times because it kept breaking. Yes, I know things like LightDM can crash, and GDM3 is the same, HOWEVER it is still 100% unexcusable. Now that's where the bugs end. At least the ones that I wanted to skim over, ignoring the ones that I really can't explain nor care to, and the one that I want to talk about.

## The Single Worst situation.
So after 3 boot loops in a row, I finally said: "Here, let's re-install". I reinstalled everything, letting it do the things it said was best. Finally... GRUB boot error. This freaked me out, as it broke GRUB, the ONLY way I am able to boot everything, I quickly grabbed my 2nd drive with an OS on it and quickly started removing MX Linux and re-installing GRUB. I swear, after that, I almost cried when I saw something on Reboot.

I went to get some water, freaking out, I came back and saw the most glorious thing I have ever seen. My Ubuntu 20.04 install, for Ubuntu Lumina. I actually fainted. This means everything was working as normal, 100% normal. Ubuntu Lumina in fact boots first, I am not at all sure why that is, but it does. I log into my main OS and *almost* nothing was corrupted. Everything that was, I didn't need.

# Conclusion
I will never use MX Linux again, but this is only out to vent my frustrations of *yesterday* and so now I sit and say: Go ahead and try it, my issues are seemingly rare. What happened to me was probably a fluke with billions of possible answers, like maybe a tiny bit got corrupted on install, maybe my external drives larger than my internal one was an issue. Maybe it was because my laptop's hard drive is about the same size as a large USB drive (128GB) and trying to make it hold 3 operating systems was a bad idea. Or maybe my HP notebook 14 is just trash.

I'm going to say all of the above.