Longtime Mint stickler here, never developed a taste for any other distro schools (Arch, Fedora, other *buntus and Debians). But tried out MX after a long period of deferring and I am genuinely blown away. This distro has everything I could have ever ask for - Debian stability coupled with advanced hardware support (with more recent zen kernels and drivers), a solid opinionated Plasma DE setup that is both minimalist and all-encompassing at the same time, and a full stock of sensible and pragmatic utilities to cover the boring stuff.
Mint’s relative lethargy at migrating to wayland has been increasingly becoming a sore point due to the sheer practical difference it makes (especially in terms of multi-monitor HiDPI and fractional scaling, in addition to security and performance). MX KDE has all that covered and then some. It’s the first time I had to genuinely stretch to find any fault. The only complaint I have is that they aren’t letting me post this testimonial in the MX forum because it doesn’t accept anon-aliased emails for logins.
I was also interested in trying that one with KDE, thanks for posting this.
I have one question: Are you still required to reinstall when a major new version comes out? I remember last I looked (a while ago) there was no upgrading path.
TIL. That definitely puts me off, like WTF? How can you fuck up a perfectly upgradable Debian like that?
That’s definitely off-putting. Though, I do feel Debian can learn a thing or two for making major release updates more seamless. Perhaps it’s the doing of the law of equivalent exchange; after two[1] years of bliss (read: easy updates), we just have to accept a brief moment of intense suffering (read: way more involved update).
You can definitely use it longer, though two years feels like the sweet spot. ↩︎
True, there are legitimate reasons why most people use Ubuntu or a Ubuntu-derivative on desktop, rather than straight Debian.That said, last time I did a major release upgrade on a desktop Debian system, I did maybe half of these steps and it still went without issue. The only issue that ever comes up for me when I upgrade Debian or Ubuntu is that things change how they work and I need to redo some of my configuration to account for it, and I do so much custom configuration that it can be kind of PITA sometimes. But that wouldn’t be any different on any other distro.
two years feels like the sweet spot.
I’m a big fan of skipping over one major release when upgrading, that way I get 4 (Ubuntu) or 5-6 (Debian) years of bliss. Software like webbrowsers, yt-dlp or Signal that needs to be really fresh is better installed through pip or flatpak anyway.
Yes, unfortunately you have to clean install (they have a guide for it). It’s fine for me since it’s based on Debian, which has a very long support cycle spanning two or more years generally.
Mint’s relative lethargy at migrating to wayland has been increasingly becoming a sore point due to the sheer practical difference it makes
I mean, pretty much every desktop environment that’s not Gnome or KDE has been dragging its feet. AFAIK Cinnamon is on track to be *the first smaller DE with full wayland support. I understand that you don’t want to wait if you’re actually interested in some of wayland’s features, though.
*one of
AFAIK Cinnamon is on track to be the first smaller DE with full wayland support.
I think Budgie just beat them to it. To be clear, Budgie 10.10 is literally Wayland-only.
Neat!
I mean, pretty much every desktop environment that’s not Gnome or KDE has been dragging its feet.
To be fair, migrating a desktop environment from X11 to Wayland is a lot of work, Wayland still hasn’t reached feature parity, and most desktop environments are maintained by very few people with scant resources. It’s no surprise that the big ones are ahead of the others.
What about COSMIC? It is Wayland only. Do you consider COSMIC to be a “smaller DE”?
I tried COSMIC on PopOS and had the same sour experience that LTT famously did in his recent video. And honestly, considering that it is visually and functionally no different than GNOME (which is already on wayland and much more stable), I don’t know why they’re even bothering with it.
I already edited my comment to say “one of the first” 3 hours ago.
Also yes, I consider every linux DE that isn’t Gnome or KDE “smaller”.
I assume edit changes take a while before they are updated on all other instances. I had similar “issues” in the past too. It’s pretty annoying. When I replied it didn’t show the edited version.
I suppose COSMIC technically never migrated/transitioned from X11 to Wayland, because it’s been Wayland-only from inception.
I should have quoted the part I am referring to:
Cinnamon is on track to be *the first smaller DE with full wayland support. I understand that you don’t want to wait if you’re actually interested in some of wayland’s features, though.
I meant that there is a desktop environment with full Wayland support. And my question was if s/he considers COSMIC to be a smaller DE, that could qualify this statement.
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Thanks for posting this. I’ve been keeping MX Linux in the back of my mind as a possible Debian alternative if I ever need one.
they aren’t letting me post this testimonial in the MX forum because it doesn’t accept anon-aliased emails for logins.
Ouch. That’s a red flag for me, since it forces people to expose themselves to spam and tracking if they want to participate in the community. Which alias service did they reject? Maybe there’s one that doesn’t trigger their rule?
addy.io is the one I’m using
In case you want to try some others:
https://simplelogin.io/
https://relay.firefox.com/
https://www.33mail.com/
https://erine.email/Unfortunately, some misguided (or possibly malicious) people collect email forwarding domains like these and publish them in lists dishonestly advertised as spam or disposable address lists. An unfortunate number of service developers have taken to using these lists, leading to the situation you’re in now.
The best suggestions I can offer:
- Complain to the administrators of each site that does this, making sure to explain why it’s a problem. There’s a chance that some of them honestly don’t realize that legitimate forwarding domains are being swept up into a dragnet intended for spammers, and might stop using those lists if they were made aware.
- When choosing a forwarding service, pick one offering domain names that haven’t been picked up by the blacklists. This might require non-default settings when creating a forwarding address, or paying for access to the more obscure domains.
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Are you on systemd or sysVinit? If you’re on the latter, could you tell if you’ve even noticed any difference so far? Thanks in advance!
No, I chose systemd for the familiarity.
