MX Linux MX-23.4 Libretto review (original) (raw)

MX Linux MX-23.4 Libretto review - Slick, elegant, fun

Updated: October 10, 2024

As you well know, I've stopped doing distro reviews, for the most part, a couple of years back. I found the lack of progress in the distro space quite disheartening. And by lack of progress, I mean the constant seesaw of quality and stability, the missing factor of "finished" product. That said, now and then, I do make an odd exception. Recently, I wrote a review of Kubuntu 24.04. Today, I will give MX Linux a full, proper look.

Why so? Well, if you've been reading me articles, as you very well should, then you will have come across a glowing article showcasing an amazing revival of one old, lowly Asus eeePC. This was done by installing a modern, contemporary MX Linux distro on a 14-year-old netbook, with pretty decent results. I was so impressed that I decided to test Libretto on my relatively newish AMD-powered IdeaPad 3. We shall thus commence this review. After me.

Getting started

I booted the distro from a USB drive. Unlike the eeePC escapade, here I used the latest dot release (23.4), and the 64-bit version, of course. I chose the Plasma edition rather than the default Xfce, because 1) I prefer Plasma, as it's the best desktop out there 2) we've already seen the other environment in action just a few days back, so some variety won't hurt. The system booted fine, without any noise or weird flickering. A clean boot splash.

The default desktop is a bit oppressive - dark panel, dark wallpaper. It feels stifling. I am not sure how an almost entirely black (or dark gray) rectangle of pixels is a good way to showcase the beauty of an operating system. Some colors!

I am not keen on the menu configuration, as chosen.

Now, MX Linux comes with a fantastic feature - it can preserve all of your changes from the live session during the installation, so you don't need to redo your customization after the distro has been committed to disk. I decided, just before installing, to make the desktop pretty, and then start the process.

I did my usual share of tweaks - scaling to 131.25% (X, not Wayland, of course, duh), new wallpaper, a few small things like that. I didn't need to change the font color to black, as MX Linux already ships with the superior option in place. Notably, the mouse is set to single click rather than double click, and this is probably the most annoying thing I could think of. Also, depending on your wallpaper, the Conky system monitor might not be legible. More on that later.

With some small changes. Already more vibrant. Notice the superb range of MX Tools.

While the system uses black fonts, Kate, the text editor, does not. It uses the Breeze theme. I created a new theme, called Brooze, which significantly helps (you can then manually invoke it, and set it as default).

The Plasma integration prompt comes with a brand new and lovely icon:

While playing with the system, I decided to check the details some more. I've already noticed and noted this in the eeePC review, but Libretto comes with support until June 2028. That's five nice, respectable years. I've always complained that most distros, except the Ubuntu family, lack the LTS option, and this severely limits their usability for serious, long-term productivity. Well, MX Linux now joins this practical, useful club.

Installation

This was an interesting affair. My IdeaPad 3 dual-boots Windows 11 and KDE neon, at the moment. I decided to try a rather radical little setup - add MX Linux as the third distro into this configuration. But I did this change in a somewhat wicked manner. I preserved the larger partition (which hosts neon), and set it as the /home partition for Libretto, and then used the smaller available partition as the root for my new installation.

I had to widen the installer wizard window - otherwise, the partition information, especially the crucial Format column, is not clearly displayed. I'm also bothered by the difference in the font sizes for column headers.

I forgot to mark the EFI partition, and the installer warned me about that. Now, the installer is quite ugly, so to speak, but it is quite functional. It offers the necessary information, and tries to play it safe, for the most part. It can be improved, but it's among the least annoying Linux installers nowadays. Funny how, a decade ago, we had so much better installer tools than we have now, across the entire Linux desktop space.

Most importantly, I marked: Save live desktop changes. This setting is so valuable, so useful, and I don't think it's marked or shown or explained prominently enough. But it allows you to play with a distro for a few hours, and then install everything without losing all your nice changes.

The installation took roughly 4 minutes - MX Linux has always had short setups, and it's well ahead of the crowd. Well, once this step was done, I tried to restart - here, the distro got stuck on the "logout" splash screen. I don't know what happened. I let it sit there for a couple of minutes, then rebooted the machine by hand.

The triple-boot was properly configured, everything works. The boot sequence isn't so clean anymore, you get to see some text messages before the distro switches to the normal, clean splash. No flickering, no multiple resolutions. An improvement. The KDE desktop comes with an animated splash screen of its own - this does not really help in any way (makes the login longer, too), and seems weird in the overall "feel" of the MX Linux distro.

Total boot time? About 14 seconds to login screen, 4 more to the desktop. This is similar to most distros tested on this IdeaPad in the past three or four years. Now, MX Linux does this with the "old" init rather than systemd, which shows you that you can still do modern and relevant things without resorting to an overcomplicated designed-for-enterprises and not-meant-for-home-use monstrosity like systemd. And you don't get slower boot times, either. Just shows that everything that happened in the "modern" boot space in the past decade is largely unnecessary, especially if you're running things on your laptop and not some mega server.

Now, MX Linux also has systemd, so you can switch if you like. Again, an advantage that most other distros do not have. Well, if you ask me, we should stick with init and X until the universe collapses, but if you want to hear more about my perspective on that topic, start with the Wayland 2024 report linked above.

Using Libretto

All right, my distro was now installed. The first question we must ask, has everything been correctly preserved, the way it was supposed to? Well, the answer is yes, mostly, but not everything. To wit:

• I had disabled Bluetooth in the session, and quit Yakuake, but those changes were not set as permanent. I guess because I didn't turn off the Bluetooth service or disabled the Yakuake autostart. So I can't really count this against MX Linux.
• Kate started with the Breeze theme, I had to switch to Brooze (but the theme was carried over). However, for some reason, when I double-clicked on a text file in Dolphin, it opened in KWrite and not Kate. I guess the former is set as the default text editor.
• The Firefox profile was not preserved, I had to do everything from scratch.

The rest though, including all my customizations and Wireless connection were correctly set. I could go about having fun, testing stuff, not focus on doing the same set of visual improvements I've already done, four minutes earlier. Hi hi.

Hardware compatibility

Let's start with this. In one word: good. Two words? Very good! If you recall all my past testing on this machine, pretty much every single distro would have the following two problems: 1) the display would dim fully when you plug it into power 2) the boot sequence would be dark, i.e., dimmed. Just look at my MX-21 review on this very box, a couple of years back.

This time around, there were no issues. No dimming, suspend & resume works fine, all of the Fn buttons work fine. If not for the handful of ugly text warnings during the first 1-2 seconds of the boot process, it would have been a seamless experience.

Everyday usability

Great, too. No Samba errors (although Dolphin has no option to save credentials, you must manually set them through Settings), no KDEWallet errors. Easy peasy. Pleasant, fun, useful, the way it should be. I didn't need to install too many new programs - MX Linux 23.4 comes with a rich arsenal of goodies. Probably the most sensibly complete set out there. You can easily cram GBs of programs into an image, but MX Linux delivers a nice palette, without going overboard or just randomly adding stuff for the sake of it. The list is curated, logical and practical. The only thing "missing" for me was Steam.

If you want to install software, you can use Discover, of course, or you can use the MX Package Installer, one of the many utilities in the awesome, powerful MX Tools combo. Both work reliably - and use the same resources in the backend. The basic idea is, a nod toward the newbies, who might potentially struggle with some of the intricacies of the Linux desktop usage. The system had some updates, but not many really. The experience was good, without any unnecessary noise, or pointless messages from the firmware updater tool (fwupd), as I've noted in both my KDE neon and Kubuntu reviews recently.

I changed the display gamma, because 1) the laptop's display sucks 2) I can, because the glorious and superior X offers that functionality.

Then, I spent a bit more time customizing, because, why not.

Conky games

For once, I actually wanted to use a Conky widget on my desktop. The default one is the prettiest, BUT. This one cannot display time in a 24h format, which clashes with how I set the clock in the bottom panel. So I was forced to try all sorts of different widgets. Some were nice, some were customizable, but the default one remains the best, and yet, I couldn't really use it.

Some small problems ...

Konsole crashed when I tried to change a profile (on a fully up-to-date system):

The menu wasn't wide enough to show both session and power buttons - I had to widen it for them to show, otherwise, there's nothing at all. This could be an artifact of me manually resizing the menu, but I'm not 100% sure.

SDDM in Settings suffers from the exact same bug as I noted in my Kubuntu 24.04 review and the subsequent articles. If you want to change the background, it takes a good minute or two for the buttons to render. This does not happen with the other, non-default theme. So the problem is only with the KDE Breeze SDDM theme. As I mentioned, it also happens on Kubuntu 24.04, so this must be a pure Plasma issue.

Now, Samba speed is good, the responsiveness is good, but there be no credentials saved through Dolphin. Thus, whenever you try (across login sessions), you will need to provide the username and password. I also noticed the connection timed out once before I got the prompt, and finally, if and when you do it through Settings, there's an option for only one username.

Once, the icons wouldn't drag - I couldn't rearrange the icons-only taskbar. So I had to log out, and log back in again. When you want to end the session, be it reboot or shutdown or whatnot, the username covers the actual buttons. I don't have a good screenshot of this, but trust me.

Lastly, whenever you boot, there will be a center-screen, very brief popup that lists the name of the audio controller. This vanishes on its own after a second, and it does not affect audio functionality in any way, but it feels odd.

The big disappointment

This turned out to be, predictably, Plasma System Monitor. I've ranted about this program a lot in my Kubuntu review, and now, I must do so some more. If you launch it, first, it starts with its illogical stacked graph view for the CPU activity. A classic case of overcounting. Both having the percentages stacked AND shown with different colors.

One, no one is going to be able to see anything meaningful in a stack of 8 or 16 or 32 different colors. Furthermore, if one does not know how many CPU cores they have (physical and/or logical), the stacked percentage numbers mean donkey turd. On a single-core system, 450% might be a lot, under certain circumstances (although it merely means there's 4.5x more processes in the runqueue than can be accommodated at any one time, and even then, this is not entirely accurate). But on a system with 64 cores? 450% won't mean much. And then, if you have 64 cores, imagine your CPU counter saying 3667%. What does this mean? Nonsense! Absolutely nonsense! But 55%? Anyone can understand that.

However, the big "problem" is that Plasma System Monitor could not show any applications at all:

The error reads: Applications view is unsupported on your system. What! I did some reading, and it seems to be related to cgroups v2 and systemd, blah blah blah. Vomit, nerd vomit and nonsense.

Now, the MX Linux team is partially to blame - but only partially, for including a tool that does not work correctly when booted under init (although it ought to work correctly with systemd, which they include). They should have provided an alternative.

That said, this still makes Plasma System Monitor a failure. Why? Because you can derive all of the process information by polling /proc. If programs like ps, top or htop can show everything, if I can write and compile a simple process monitor in C within 30 minutes (and my coding sucks), then there's ZERO reason why a program like this ought not to work.

But hey, it's a "modern" replacement for KSysGuard, which means it's slower, less functional, incomplete, and riddled with these error-assumptions. Why not implement a mode that can gracefully change the method of collecting the process table information? Or use a method that does not RELY ON YOUR SYSTEM BOOT MANAGER! What kind of implementation is that? Why?

Battery life

Okay. We know from the past that this IdeaPad can do 5-6 hours of light usage. But that was on a battery that could hold its full capacity. Now, with the battery health at 80%, and brightness at 80% too, and some light-to-moderate usage, my system said it could do about 2 hours 40 minutes at 81% charge (not 80%, I didn't time it right, or maybe I did, just to spite your OCD gremlins). This translates to about 4 hours of use, if the battery was brand new. Reduce the brightness some, and we're looking at 4.5 hours. This is a bit worse than 2-3 years back, but not too bad.

Conclusion

I have to say, I'm very pleased with this distro. Let's count it. Five years of support, check. Plasma or Xfce desktops, both styled reasonably, check. The Plasma edition is beautiful. You can preserve your live session, and this is probably the one distro that does that, and does it reliably. The MX Tools set is more advanced than pretty much any toolbox out there, and it includes system snapshot - so you can boot your customized distro from a USB drive and re-install it anywhere you like. The distro is continually improving while maintaining its clear identity. Not strictly related to this particular review, but it's among the few offering 32-bit builds for old machines. Most distros flaunt the "we can make your legacy boxes alive again" slogan, but MX Linux actually does it.

When you take into account everything: aesthetics, speed, stability, support promise, flexibility of usage and wide range of choices in every aspect of use, the session save trick, tons of useful programs, and tons of useful utilities, well, you get a pleasant, fruitful experience. You can feel the MX Linux team cares, and this sets them apart against the great apathy gripping the Linux desktop space. I am carefully considering deploying MX Linux for serious productivity, beyond the eeePC and the work I did on an older laptop (the one now running Kubuntu 24.04). Yup. And that's a pretty strong endorsement from me. See ya.

Cheers.