MX Linux Hype?

For the longest time, viewers have been asking me to look at MX Linux. And before the Distro Delves series, I had no plans to.

The recent MX Linux 19.1 release gave me the perfect opportunity to test the latest & greatest flavor of MX Linux and, well lemme just say it:

I'm not impressed

Not for the amount MX Linux is hyped, anyway. For a regular Linux distribution that is based on vanilla Debian, sure, it's good. But for the amount people drum it up? I was expecting way more.

MX is built on Debian stable (stale?) and uses a very custom but no-frills Xfce desktop. I did see an option to use Compton for fancy effects but it wasn't enabled by default. So, the standard desktop is less flashy than even Windows XP was.

Being based on Debian stable, the drivers & kernel version was old. The applications MX ships with also felt equally old. For a distro released in early 2020, everything about it felt dated.

One of the things that MX Linux boasts about is it's performance. The Geekbench5 benchmarks certainly show a performance advantage in the CPU department but the gaming performance was very poor when compared to other distros in the series.

And Xfce is fast. It is built to be lightweight and quick. Any Xfce-based distro feels "fast".

Like I already said, for the amount people talk about MX and the DistroWatch ratings, I expected a lot more.

MX Linux is pretty basic in looks & functionality and if you want more out of it you have to be willing to get your hands dirty. That doesn't impress me.

So I showcased the new Distro Delves repo on GitHub in the video and I'm hoping people will submit their favorite distros for me to review. I think making videos for the series will be a lot more fun if people are voting and anticipating their favorite distros!

What do you guys think of MX Linux and the GitHub repo thing??