I decided to catch up with MX Linux and check out the latest release of the project, 19.4. In this video, I go over some of the things that makes MX Linux so popular, as well as some thoughts on the installation process, performance, customization options, and more!
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Thanks for the review of a great distro. You made a good point about the installer not excluding the USB drive, but I believe that was on purpose. If you check out the video below, it shows how to make a new LiveMX with just one USB key by loading everything into RAM during the live USB boot.
MX and the Antix communities share the same installer and it is a collaborative effort between the two development teams. Antix is perhaps better known as a full featured Live USB distro, but because they share the same installer and boot options, MX can be used in a similar way. Because of this collaboration, there are plenty of Antix and MX users who run their entire distro from a USB flash drive, therefore that explains some of the reason behind what seems like a strange option in the installer if you are used to installing your distro to your system’s hard drive. There are other decisions that MX has made like not using SystemD by default, because it would interfere with the capabilities of a USB flash drive install. I will note that you can switch to SystemD as your init system if you want to in MX.
Check out this video by one of the MX developers, and you will see what I mean.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGVgGMhP1d4Thanks again for a great job @jay, and I do hope that users give MX a try. I know that the developers are very focused on creating and giving to the user tools, often GUI tools, to tweak their MX install to their own personal preferences.
You also asked if there might be a reason to run the older 4.19 kernel. That is the version that I use on my daily driver desktop, but my hardware is older (8-10 years). The AHS with 5.10 might work perfectly fine on this desktop too, I haven’t done any testing because it was new when I put this system together. Sometimes, the kernel team drops support in later kernels for some older hardware. If you have older hardware, you might have a better time with the non AHS version, but you are probably right, that most users should probably install the AHS version of MX Linux.