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.
The main reason I’m using Mint, the ancient NVIDIA card GT750M in my old laptop. Using the nouveau driver is buggy and slow, so I have to run the old NVIDIA binary drivers. These aren’t supported by newer kernel versions, so I‘m stuck on an old version. Wayland doesn’t run with the old NVIDIA driver in the first place because it lacks Vulkan support. The machine even has hybrid graphics with an Intel Iris Pro in addition to the NVIDIA card. However running only the Intel graphics seems to be impossible.
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.
I did maybe half of these steps and it still went without issue.
That’s cool and all. But, to give some context as to where I’m coming from: for the last 2-3 years or so, I receive automatic major release updates in the background. Sometimes, it takes me up to a week before I even notice it. I wish to see the day that Debian is released from its
UnattendedUpgrades shackles and can ascend into pure bliss.I’m a big fan of skipping over one major release when upgrading
I’m too paranoid on security to consider that 😅. But I’m glad it works out for you.
That’s cool and all. But, to give some context as to where I’m coming from: for the last 2-3 years or so, I receive automatic major release updates in the background. Sometimes, it takes me up to a week before I even notice it. I wish to see the day that Debian is released from its UnattendedUpgrades shackles and can ascend into pure bliss.
?
You can easily disable or uninstall unattended upgrades, and I would definitely have noticed if Debian’s unattended upgrades automatically did major release upgrades on its own …
I’m too paranoid on security to consider that 😅. But I’m glad it works out for you.
IMO that’s not an issue at all, both Debian and Ubuntu are very good about providing security updates for their oldstable releases. Maybe your desktop environment or text editor isn’t going to receive updates anymore, but I have a really hard time imagining a relevant scenario where that makes a difference for security.
?
You can easily disable or uninstall unattended upgrades, and I would definitely have noticed if Debian’s unattended upgrades automatically did major release upgrades on its own …
To be clear, the automatic major release updates in the background does not happen on Debian. I was describing the experience on my daily driver; which happens to be another distro. That’s why I wish to see the day in which Debian does receive this. I’m aware of UnattendedUpgrades doing minor upgrades only; so no major upgrades*.
IMO that’s not an issue at all, both Debian and Ubuntu are very good about providing security updates for their oldstable releases. Maybe your desktop environment or text editor isn’t going to receive updates anymore, but I have a really hard time imagining a relevant scenario where that makes a difference for security.
I absolutely love the effort put in by Debian’s Security Team. But as they only provide it for three years after release, I don’t feel confident to continue using it, even if I value the work of the group of volunteers that make Debian LTS possible. Note that “too paranoid” were keywords in my previous message.
Why the hell would you want major release upgrades in unattended upgrades? This is exactly what most people specifically don’t want their OS to do.
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.
