Linux for Beginners - MX Linux

buster · February 16, 2019, 06:28:24 PM

A year or two ago, I was hesitant to recommend MX for beginners. The motto of Mepis was "It just works." And I think MX fills the role of it's ancestor beautifully. It does 'just work'. Nothing convoluted or difficult.Everything you will ever need is in the bottom left hand corner somewhere. And it's good for older hardware. Codecs are there as well.

And it has been promoted to the Major Distributions page of Distrowatch, which indicates a certain belief in this reincarnation of Mepis.

https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

I think it's a good choice for this list.

buster · February 16, 2019, 07:42:54 PM

HOWEVER....

I think Mint is better. And not just a bit. It is the gold standard in my admittedly warped opinion.

Jason · February 16, 2019, 08:29:59 PM

I think you're right that it's good for beginners. I'm considering a rethink of that Distros for Beginners page. What I'd like to do is for us to decide on some criteria of what makes a good distro for beginners. More on this later.

fox · February 16, 2019, 10:02:22 PM

I still have MX installed on a laptop and I agree that it is really easy to install and operate. But the one thing against it is that it doesn't work with secure boot. It's easy enough to disable secure boot, but maybe not for beginners.

Jason · February 17, 2019, 12:50:44 PM

Quote from: fox on February 16, 2019, 10:02:22 PM
I still have MX installed on a laptop and I agree that it is really easy to install and operate. But the one thing against it is that it doesn't work with secure boot. It's easy enough to disable secure boot, but maybe not for beginners.

Good point. Do you know if any of the other distros listed on our Beginner Linux Distros page don't work with secure boot?

fox · February 17, 2019, 01:55:52 PM

Quote from: Jason Wallwork on February 17, 2019, 12:50:44 PM
....
Do you know if any of the other distros listed on our Beginner Linux Distros page don't work with secure boot?

All of those listed are based on Ubuntu, and therefore should work with secure boot. MX Linux is based on Debian, which apparently will not.

Jason · February 17, 2019, 02:24:54 PM

Thanks. Strange that Debian doesn't bother to get their kernel registered but then again Debian probably hates Secure Boot and wants nothing to do with it.