You're probably the first person ever to daily drive MX Linux, the most popular distro according to distrowatch
this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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Is this real? I'm convinced MX is trash due to distrowatch fuckery
I thought it is highly possible they may had gamed the system at some point, but doubting it less and less by the day... they would have been very consistent for hundreds and hundreds of days! Once you actually installed it, you will realize it is among the most polished yet stable Linux distros there is and has had a very consistent competent team.
Now, I don' think it has a high popularity at all among newcomers, let alone people on forums (look at the popular KDE variant download per week... 112 vs the 'rare' Xfce with 3444). Their base are people that probably are more avid visitors to the legendary Distrowatch than active to these forums, therefore the low visibility to us.
By the way, tried MX KDE and it is really good, I recommend its team stop selling it just as ideal for "old machines", it is perfect for any one that does not want a rolling release. It is for people that would like Debian but want it more polish without getting into Ubuntu or Cinnamon territory. I would go even further... they should even offer a KDE-advanced version with updated Kernel and KDE (like TUXEDO OS does) and i think they will become a hit! But I understand they may lacking resources for that... offering SystemD and SysVinit must be highly intensive on itself already. I have grown to trust them.
Wym?
MX got popular because it was #1 on DistroWatch because they just refreshed the page over-and-over, which is how ranking works (by page load count) on DistroWatch
Their default browser resets the home page to their site so they get artificial visits from every installed instance.
Man I forgot how slick XFCE looked
MX and AntiX are just that right balance between functionality and lightweight. Loving it.
Is that clock conky? Wow I haven't seen a conky file in over a decade
Yeah I just left it default.
It looks great!
Thx 😊
what do you like about it?
MX Linux is great for resource management on my Dell E5470. While the switch to Thunar from Fedora/Debian had a slight learning curve (especially the Shift+drag mechanic), the customizability via GTK themes is excellent. The biggest win for me is the hardware compatibility—it handles my mobile hotspot flawlessly where other distros like Fedora and LMDE struggled. It’s stable, light, and just works I personally use it as my Daily Driver at the moment because I've yet to find a better distro that doesn't eat my resources and disconnect my mobile hotspot but I've been messing around with NixOS in a VM it might be my next one this is like my fourth or fifth distro.
biggest win for me is the hardware compatibility
how do you mean? Doesn't it use the same Linux kernel as everyone else? Why would some hardware be more compatible?
Ye, but what I mean by 'compatibility' is that it isn’t picky with my drivers like other distros I've tried. Fedora acts a bit strange on my hardware, and half the distros I’ve used have issues dropping my hotspot connection. MX Linux just works, especially on older hardware. While I like Fedora and Debian, MX feels much more resource-efficient for a system with 8 gigs of RAM.
MX Linux is a midweight, desktop-oriented Linux distribution based on Debian Stable 13 "trixie" that emphasizes stability, performance, and ease of use.
Why not Debian directly instead of MX?
MX Tools. The same reason why one daily drives LMDE
The one thing I recently learned that sucks is they stopped support for their media codecs installer thing. Not available on their latest latest repo from what I can find.
Otherwise, yeah, the tools are pretty cool for when you need them.
Why not Debian directly instead of MX?
Debian requires more config out-of-the-box to get a nice desktop/laptop experience. This is ready to go.
I was actually on Debian for a while, but I had constant issues with it dropping my mobile hotspot connection. It required a bit too much configuration for my liking, though the installer itself was decent. Debian was actually my fourth distro—I’ve spent time with Lubuntu, LMDE, Fedora, and MX. After struggling with Debian for a while, I’m back on MX Linux. I've also experimented with Parrot OS home edition, but I’ve found that some distros just play better with mobile hotspots than others. Home internet is getting pricey, so I prefer sticking to public Wi-Fi and my hotspot for the time being.
Used MX Linux one time then it promptly shit the bed for reasons unknown. Fedora Kinoite and have been trouble free since. I could break an anvil tho...
MX is great. The MX tools are very useful and Sysvinit isn't as difficult to use as I had assumed. It runs great on an old thinkpad of mine. Seems like a very viable option for people looking to self-host on older gear.
Debian > MEPIS > MX and Debian > MEPIS > AntiX > MX right?
With focus on elegance, stability and efficiency, using XFCE, KDE and Fluxbox.
While MEPIS wanted to be an alternative to SUSE, Redhat and Mandriva.
Grub and Systemd for boot. Has some of their own maintenance tooling.
Also, fuck that clickbaity title.
I have MX Linux on a 14 year old Dell Laptop.
Works great because it's got a lightweight desktop, and it has a tool (a GUI tool even!) that seamlessly merges the last available Nvidia 340 drivers for my GPU into the latest kernel. Parked at the desktop with no desktop apps running, it uses about 800MB of ram, leaving 15 GB left for whatever I need to run. Which I have found is plenty for my use case, I've never seen swap in use.
The MX tools are good, like everyone else has been saying here. They take away a lot of the fiddly business associated with the average "sysadmin" things that an end user needs to do.
I still need to try this.
I downloaded and started seeding it when there was a post about it a few weeks back but haven't had time to try it.
I assume the ISO live boots from a USB so I can poke around without installing? Surely.
I've got an old laptop that I kept windows on for the once every few years I had to use windows but I don't think it's supported anymore and I'd actually use it occasionally if I put Linux on it ;)
You can run Windows in vms on Linux if you don't need screaming performance. I think you can directly install from iso with Incus as well. I haven't find this yet, i used Qemu instead.
I haven't truly needed to use windows in probably 4 years. And those few needs were specific to helping someone who was on windows figure out some windows tomfuckery. I don't think I care anymore... I can just give them a Linux ISO and call it good now.
Good to know though. Just in case.
Is this distro somewhat beginner friendly? I've used Zorin and a little bit of Mint before.
To be fair, at this point any distro is beginner friendly.
Just stay away from Gentoo, and from arch if you don't want the maintenance burden.
That's good to know. I think my question comes from struggling to figure out Endeavour, switched back to Zorin (at the time) pretty quickly lol.
I'd say it's beginner-friendly. This is only my fourth distro, so I'm still relatively new, but it wasn't that hard. If you can manage to get past the installer, it's actually very straightforward. Most stuff is already configured; it's pretty cool.
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LxQt my beloved
I used to love the minimalism of lxqt over xfce until I learned that QT is proprietary and GTK is open source, therefore I'm with now xfce for life.
Qt is not proprietary if you use it for an open source project, they have an open source license if you are an individual who doesn't use it for profit.
Edit: KDE also is built on top of Qt
This is XFCE.
I'm only used it as installed onto a USB, and in fact I chose it for that reason, so my experience isn't ideal because of that USB drive speed but it's a great lightweight OS that looks nice out of the box. Lightweight doesn't have to look clunky or feel strange or unfeatured. I recommend it if there are reasons that lightweight is important (old hardware, low-end hardware, portable OS, ... )
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