MX Linux 23.2 released

[crosscourt]

Look here, https://distrowatch.com/12039

[bin]

Well, having gone all the way round Robin Hood's barn I found myself back on MX AHS last week but now on Bookworm.

[wove]

Since @bin touted the usefulness of Evolution, I have moved back to using it and while I still think it has a messy UI, Evolutions stability and portability is a real winner. I would be interested in what hardware you have and what DE you choose for MX. I am guessing XFCE?

[crosscourt]

It use to be that XFCE was the die hard choice with MX but thats changing as many now prefer the KDE version. MX is still my favorite distro at the moment.

[crosscourt]

Just upgraded to 23.2 and the 6.6.11 AHS kernel which worked fine on my Lenovo Thinkcentre M700 Tiny. Its great as all my USB WIFI adapters work, which wasnt the case using the 6.1 kernel. Discover has cleaned up its act and installed the updates with no issues.

[bin]

Since @bin touted the usefulness of Evolution, I have moved back to using it and while I still think it has a messy UI, Evolutions stability and portability is a real winner. I would be interested in what hardware you have and what DE you choose for MX. I am guessing XFCE?

It's more a case of I use XFCE irrespective of what's driving it.
Desktop - Dell Optiplex 7040 SFF - 16gb RAM
Laptop - Lenovo E530 - 16gb RAM
Acer E1-571 i3 - 8Gb RAM

They all run Evolution quite happily.
The Lenovo is running SolydX
The Acer is running Sparky (Bullseye I think - only gets used once a month at the moment)

Desktop - well actually since yesterday I've gone back to SolydX.

I like MX in terms of what it provides, but it does tend to wrap up a lot of simple things in complicated ways.

[wove]

My knee jerk reaction is to go with Gnome “irrespective of what’s driving it”. All the DEs do the same stuff; pick which ever floats your boat. I am fond of Lenovo hardware. I know nothing at all about Acer and my experience with Dell was back in the late 90s and early oughts. Dell was struggling with quality issues at that point. I have never messed with Dell since then.

I like MX in terms of what it provides, but it does tend to wrap up a lot of simple things in complicated ways.

That sums up my thoughts about a lot of the derivative distros.

[crosscourt]

MX wasnt focused on advanced users and was trying to pull beginner-intermediate users into an environment, where moving to Linux or from Windows would be easier. In my case I was a Mepis user for quite some time, so I was drawn to MX and even though I like MX Tools I really didnt need most of them, but they certainly make things easier and a lot quicker. User features with MX are outstanding and yes you can just use Debian but for many having those additional GUI features are going to attract many users who might not bother looking at Linux.
I use to use SolydK but at that point there were many issues and I moved on.

Ive used mostly Dell but Ive used Acer, Lenovo and HP as well and overall all have been pretty good.

[wove]

Laptop - Lenovo E530 - 16gb RAM

Any time I see a piece of hardware listed that I am not familiar with I go look it up. I was not familiar with the E series of ThinkPads. The Lenovo E530 looks just about like my Lenovo T580 and has very similar specs. The T580 is a very nice machine. It has a nice screen, excellent keyboard and finally Lenovo has a decent site trackpad. In appearance it looks very much like the E530. I do appreciate the 15.6" screen. I purchased 2 T580s. I use mine mostly just for playing around with. It runs any OS I try on it, and generally runs them well.

The T580 is easy to turn into a Hackintosh, and I did that for my wife. It replaced her X220. The USB C dock I had got for the Pinebook Pro that did not work with the Pinebook Pro, works fine with the T580. Using the dock she can use the T580 either as a laptop or a desk top. The Lenovo T580 is really an excellent piece of hardware. I expect that the wife and I will be using them for years to come.

[bin]

This particular machine belonged to my son for 10 years and has had 10 years use. The fan blades were clogged solid and the rubberised paint coating on the lid had gone sticky. Cleaned the whole thing out, removed heaven knows what from under the keys, stripped off the sticky rubber paint by use of paper towel soaked in meths dabbed on to soften the goo then old credit card to carefully scrape, repeat until all clean and lovely.
The 530 is not hugely fast, the big plus is a matte display so very reduced reflections. I had to get a new power supply but tracked down a new old stock Lenovo unit. The Acer is faster in all respects - that was a real frankenstein project as the hinge mount had broken up internally (common problem) so had to build up a new platform to fix it to (through) so the lid still worked. Succeeded and all good. The machine cost about $35 and only had about 1000 hours use since 2013 - bargain.

Anyhoo - the reason I dropped MX bookworm is because it will not recognise my web cam/microphone set. Bullseye - no probs. Too much to do to go hacking around to sort it - coupled with having to sort out sample rate problems in Pipewire - got all that worked out in Pulse so moved on. SolydX isn't perfect but it does still use Pulse and behaves with the cam/microphone set (v. old Logitech).