I’m a software developer with plenty of linux experience but I just want a distro that just works without me having to troubleshoot everything all the time. I am lazy and I just want something easy and reliable. I don’t want an update to break it. But I want the ability to customise it if I want to and the ability to install pretty much everything available easily.
Basically I want MacOS, but as Linux. I’m very hopeful that there’s something I have overlooked!
Something arch based is probably not a good fit for this. Its important to be prepared to maintain your system and manually intervene in package upgrades with something like arch.
You may not always need to, and I’m sure many folks never run into an issue, but arch is kinda fundamentally built to be used and maintained in a way that isn’t really compatible with what op is saying they want
What’s your opinion on MX Linux then?
Edit: just realized this was in a different comment thread than I though, I should have checked. It depends on your usecase. if you mean for op, I think he’d be better served by a bigger project because he didn’t sound like he needed something, or a combination of something’s that he could best get from MX linux specifically that’s hard to find from a different distro
– Original comment:
I have pretty much no familiarity with it, but it seems like a well respected project which is a good start. What’s your usecase? It seems like a big part of the appeal is a stable base of debian and looks like it may have newer packages availability as it’s listed as a semi-rolling release, but I’d probably wanna confirm that if that sounds like a reason you’re interested since it is based on debian stable. Another big part of the appeal is that it seems like folks realy like some of the graphical tools for configuration stuff that may not normally have a graphical option. Looks like a decent middle/lightweight distro, built on debian.
I’d say downsides are that it looks like a smaller project than many which can mean the experience can be less consistent with less resources to test packages and the installer on everything under the sun. But its been around since 2014, and is part of a broader community of distros, which are a very good sign for a smaller distro, it doesn’t seem like a little garage project with one developer who might just disappear. Its not the most elegant looking (subjective, of course), at least on the xfce desktop, but if you’re using xfce, performance is probably a more important consideration. And you can make pretty much any distro look nice with some work put into theming and customization
I don’t think it’s a distro I’d be likely to pick for myself, but it seems well regarded so I think it really depends on whether it offers something specific that you want, or a combination of attributesyoyu can’t get from a larger distribution. For many people’s use case’s, a smaller distro is going to have meaningful tradeoffs with less documentation and pre-existing questions and answers, fewer people to ask for help, and potentially worse support for hardware configurations that aren’t ubiquitous. Scale really helps in many respects, but sometimes only a small distro has what you want, it just depends what you’re looking for. If you’re a very new user, I’d encourage you to consider whether there are options a little less off the beaten path, but MX linux doesnt look like a bad choice at all if its a fit for specific needs you have
As a minimalist user I prefer to use MX for tiny/older machines, like the plethora of chromebooks now currently outside of official support that can be (mostly) softmodded to use a CFW and another OS. I have good luck with Endeavour, but as I learned debian first my first OS on a Chromebook that actually installed was MX, and it actually gave it back the originally advertised battery life, amongst regular updates and such I’d say it’s worthy of a spin for an older, lower powered machine versus something that’s kinda bloated in perspective like Ubuntu.