MX Linux KDE appreciation post

6 months ago by balian to c/linux

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.

rumschlumpel 7 points 6 months ago

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

path: 0 23104204, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 10

OUwUO 8 points 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23104204 23104334, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 1

rumschlumpel 3 points 6 months ago

Neat!

path: 0 23104204 23104334 23104473, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0

who 3 points 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23104204 23104642, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0

thingsiplay 1 point 6 months ago

What about COSMIC? It is Wayland only. Do you consider COSMIC to be a "smaller DE"?

path: 0 23104204 23105713, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 6

OUwUO 2 points 6 months ago

I suppose COSMIC technically never migrated/transitioned from X11 to Wayland, because it's been Wayland-only from inception.

path: 0 23104204 23105713 23105761, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 2

thingsiplay 1 point 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23104204 23105713 23105761 23105834, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1

rajdidaj 2 points 6 months ago

path: 0 23104204 23105713 23105761 23105834 23111000, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

rumschlumpel 2 points 6 months ago

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".

path: 0 23104204 23105713 23106218, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1

thingsiplay 2 points 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23104204 23105713 23106218 23106408, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

balian 2 points 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23104204 23105713 23112797, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

OUwUO 6 points 6 months ago

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!

path: 0 23104150, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 1

balian 4 points 6 months ago

No, I chose systemd for the familiarity.

path: 0 23104150 23112810, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0

who 5 points 6 months ago

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?

path: 0 23104690, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 4

balian 2 points 6 months ago

addy.io is the one I'm using

path: 0 23104690 23112742, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1

who 2 points 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23104690 23112742 23113426, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

rajdidaj 2 points 6 months ago

path: 0 23104690 23110979, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1

rajdidaj 2 points 6 months ago

path: 0 23104690 23110979 23110980, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

Kory 4 points 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23106416, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 15

rumschlumpel 4 points 6 months ago

TIL. That definitely puts me off, like WTF? How can you fuck up a perfectly upgradable Debian like that?

path: 0 23106416 23117314, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 13

OUwUO 2 points 6 months ago

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^[You can definitely use it longer, though two years feels like the sweet spot.] years of bliss (read: easy updates), we just have to accept a brief moment of intense suffering (read: way more involved update).

path: 0 23106416 23117314 23120931, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 12

rumschlumpel 2 points 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23106416 23117314 23120931 23122405, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 11

OUwUO 1 point 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23106416 23117314 23120931 23122405 23126373, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 10

balian 4 points 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23106416 23112886, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0

Samskara 1 point 6 months ago

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.

path: 0 23127156, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

linux

@programming.dev

login for more options

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)

Also, check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

go to feed...

linux

@programming.dev

login for more options

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)

Also, check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

go to feed...