#mx linux

Made a wallpaper as a celebration for my pc update.

Free to use, not free to trace and claim as yours.

screenshot below-------------------

It's a Toshiba Satellite L755 that I swapped it's 256GB HDD drive for a 1TB one. It's currently running bookwormPup and I'm thinking of adding either MX Linux or Arch to the other partition. Dunno yet. Should I add a swap partition too? I've heard it is useful for old computers.

I barely even knew what Linux was before I got the Pi. I haven't touched my Windows machine for the past couple days. I've just been browsing the web and installing crap on my Pi.

And now it's ready to be my primary coding and writing machine. Which means I'm going to be using it even more.

When the topic of switching from Windows to Linux comes up, the topic of dual-booting almost always swiftly follows. Dual-booting is exactly what it sounds like: having two operating systems on the same computer. Usually in this case, the two OSes will be Windows and some form of Linux, often Ubuntu or Linux Mint. It’s often considered a good way to get your feet wet with Linux, without having to fully commit, and being able to switch back to Windows should you need to. However, having done the dual-boot thing multiple times before finally taking the Linux plunge, I would personally NOT recommend dual-booting in most cases.

The benefits of dual-booting are pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t go into them in great detail. The drawbacks, however, are significant, in my experience, and possibly not as obvious at first glance.

The biggest drawback is that you’re essentially splitting your computer into two slightly-less-good computers, and unless you do all your storage in the cloud, you’re 100% going to run into the situation where something you need (a file, a program, a meme you wanted to show your friends, etc) is on one partition while you have the other one booted. Which means you then have to reboot into the other partition. Rinse and repeat at least a couple times day, over the course of weeks or months. Needless to say, this is a phenomenal pain in the ass, and this “benefit” of dual-booting becomes a huge downside.

Which leads neatly to my next point: because switching between OSes is a huge pain, you will very likely wind up just using one or the other for nearly everything. Either you fall in love with the Linux experience and never touch the Windows partition, or you end up using Windows for everything because it’s more convenient and your Linux partition languishes. So you then effectively only have one OS, and half a computer that you never touch.

What’s worse is that Windows doesn’t always play nicely with other OSes. You will have to mess around in BIOS a little in order to get Linux to boot first, if that’s what you want, and sometimes even that won’t work. BIOS is scary for newbies and you could brick your computer by changing things in it, although this admittedly isn’t likely in this scenario. But the fact remains that Windows doesn’t like to share, and if you add another OS to a Windows machine, you’re going to have to fight it at least a little in order to get it to cooperate.

The final reason I don’t recommend dual-booting is that, in my experience, it’s too easy to fall back to just using the Windows partition for everything, and never actually using the Linux system you spent all that time setting up. I spent several years with Ubuntu partitions on computers that I just never used, because all my games were in Windows, and trying to get games to cooperate in Linux was too difficult (although now, most games will just work in Linux with Proton, so this is no longer an issue). Taking the path of least resistance can be too easy, and if you have Windows to fall back on, you might not ever actually learn to use Linux.

All this having been said, there are a couple of situations where I think dual-booting Windows and Linux might be a good idea. The first is when you have a program on your list of needs that will not work in Linux no matter what, and there are no good alternatives. This is true of some business software, and also some multi-player games that have built-in anti-cheat that doesn’t work in Linux. If this is the case for you, looking into dual-booting might be a good option. The second case is if Windows is OEM installed on your device (it came pre-installed), you can’t make a backup or recovery media of it, and for whatever reason you don’t feel comfortable not having a way to get back to using Windows.

There may also be other situations I haven’t thought of, where dual-booting may be a better option for you. I don’t know your hardware or your computer usage. Only you can make this decision. All of the distros on my shortlist have guides for dual-boot systems in their wikis, if you do choose to go this route.

I've used my old secondary computer to distrohop and try out various Linux distributions. And I've recently tried out MX Linux. It is Debian-based, one of my favourite things, and its flagship desktop environment is Xfce, another of my favourite things. I'm currently running Debian with Xfce on my main machine, which provides a good point of comparison.

I have used Antix, which is a closely related distro, with developers working on both. MX is a more fully-featured distro, a self-described "middle-weight" rather than lightweight. The gist of the history is that Antix was originally based on a distro called MEPIS, and when development on that distro died, the Antix community got together with the Mepis community to create a continuation, which is MX.

So what does MX add that is not in vanilla Debian with Xfce? Quite a lot actually, that makes the whole experience a lot more user friendly. The main thing is the MX tools, a set of GUI-based tools that does a ton of useful stuff. The most important IMO is a package manager with update notifications that handles flatpaks in addition to .deb based packages. On Debian, I have to use synaptic to manage .debs, install and update flatpaks entirely via command line, and remember to check for updates myself. Like I know how to do that, but can't argue with something that makes things easier.

One of the more interesting tools is a boot options manager, which enables you to configure boot options from within a booted-up system. This enables you to choose init systems between sisvinit and systemd. Systemd is not enabled by default, the default is sivinit, but it is included in order to run programs that require it. And with the boot options, you can set MX to use systemd as the default. Now systemd is controversial and there are other distros that are systemd-free versions of popular distros, like artix for arch, and devuan for debian. And MX Linux provides a good compromise in the debate by allowing you to choose the init system quite easily.

There are other mx tools, like a multimedia codec installer, a gpg key fixer, and a live usb boot maker that enables you to clone a running system, and make an iso of it, to transfer it to another computer.

MX also does other useful things, like backporting newer versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Libreoffice than what Debian provides. And flatpak is enabled by default.

The distro's documentation is excellent too. The user manual is excellent, providing information on how to use MX Linux and how it works, but also on Linux in general works and how to migrate from a proprietary OS.

Update: WOOHOO!

I do, indeed, now seem to now have the sucker up and running!

The basic install went fine. Then it rebooted straight into Windows, because of course it did. Apparently couldn't see GRUB at all. It wasn't showing up at all in the BIOS/UEFI settings.

After some fiddling around, I determined that the lovely unturnable-offable Secure Boot was, indeed, fucking with that. Going through the MX installer USB's boot options menu, I did however manage to get the thing booted into the proper full install from there. 😎

This issue is likely fixable without needing to boot from the live USB every single time, but I can figure that out later. Just leaving well enough alone for the moment, and getting the shiny new install set up more to my liking.