Mx Linux 17 Horizon review/plus follow up review

[crosscourt]

Just installed MX17 on a Compaq presario CQ5700F with an Athlon II 170U cpu, 4gb of ram, 500gb drive and Radeon HD 3000 IGP and performance is great on this low budget system.

[tlmiller]

I've actually put MX17 on my T430. Nice live session, although IMO ugly. Takes a long time once installed to make it look decent for me. Not sure if even then I like it. But I figure I'll give it a shot to see if I can learn to tolerate it.

[tlmiller]

So far I'm super missing the ability to force applications to start on the workspace of my choice. XFCE doesn't seem to have that ability...

[crosscourt]

Try to look past the fuglyness and see MX17 for the well designed distro it is. I havent worked with it that long either but thru MXtweaks i have been able to make some changes to improve it for my tastes. I enjoy XFCE and mind you I also use KDE so I take what XFCE does best and enjoy the lower resource usage.
A long term KDE user will find XFCE limited but thats ok as thats the point to XFCE, a decent feature set for a full os but the lower resource usage like a lightweight distro. I use 4gb of ram and its using 280mb at GUI after boot and that includes Conky. Without conky around 270mb.
Live session is one of the best Ive ever tried and the added features in the MXtools section is great for the average user.

[tlmiller]

Oh, I can see that it's well designed, it's just designed in a way that I dislike it.

I'm still trying to get the XFCE menu modified how I like (I think the whisker menu is everything that's wrong with "modern" menus). Can't get rid of it showing the "favorites" and no search bar in the menu. Various other minor things similar to that which prevent me from actually enjoying using it. I have found some things in my latest installation that either weren't available last time I used it or just never found, it is after quite a bit of personalizing much more tolerable. I still can't say I like it, but it's not as bad as I remember.

[crosscourt]

They designed for average users and thats really the way its always been with the overall Mepis community.

People such as yourself with specialized needs and personal preferences wont like that aspect of MX17. Ive used so many distros, in the hundreds over the years I just dont have thos types of preferences built up any more. Im very tolerant of distros but certainly if the overall distro isnt stable and easy to use, I move on.

[tlmiller]

Yeah, I realize I'm kinda the definition of a power user in terms of my preferences. For me, it's "my way or the highway" when it comes to an OS. It can be rock solid stable, if I can't get it to work like I want, it's gone from my system.

[crosscourt]

When you said you prerfered KDE that didnt surprise me as back in the day I wouldnt use anything else till the problems started to crop up particularly with KDE4 early on. I still think its the best DE for the power user, XFCE for the average user and Cinnamon for the Windows crossover user.

I will say for XFCE that its rock solid stable and ive used so many distros with it, Ive rarely had issues, particularly recently.

I still fall back to KDE and love using Mageia 6 in particular.

[crosscourt]

Ive thrown a lot of different systems and some system upgrades at MX17 and so far no issues. My recent motherboard upgrades in an older Compaq system were handled without issue, which isnt always the case with some distros.

[crosscourt]

MX 17.1 has released, go to www.mxlinux.org or if youre using MX17 just update as usual.