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>mxlinux
>What's your experience with it, and how is the "it just works" factor?
MX Linux is the first and only linux distro I have ever used full time, so I can't really give a firsthand comparison to other distributions.
It was somewhere around 2018 when I decided to make the switch to linux after having used Windows 7 daily for over a decade, I backed up everything essential and then nuked my Windows partition, replacing it with a luks encrypted installation of MX Linux from live media, going into linux blind and raw, skipping the typical dual boot coping stage of switching the OS. Over time I converted all my storage drives to luks encrypted ext4 filesystems.
The reason I picked this distro back then is because it was the most popular one on distrowatch.com at the time, that seems to be the case even now. From what I understand, their popularity list is ranked based on clicks so I can't say how big of a userbase this really has. What I have is around five years of linux experience through figuring things out with the trial and error approach, so chances are you are more experienced than I am.
When it comes to Systemd/SysVinit, MX Linux takes the approach of making SysVinit the default init system, while leaving Systemd in reserve, giving you the option of switching to it on boot if you have some reason to do so. You could probably purge systemd off the system completely if you wanted to though. The biggest issue I've faced with the distro is outdated packages in the main repositories, it's possible to work around that by selectively upgrading individual packages to newer ones from the included "MX Test" or "Debian Backports" repos, if they happen to have a recent enough version. And god forbid, rely on a third party ubuntu ppa repository for up to date mesa packages, as I have done.
Link to the FAQ: https://mxlinux.org/wiki/help-files/mx-faqs/
There is a 197 page user manual that holds your hand: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MX-Linux/mx-docs/master/mxum_en.pdf
The image I used to install the system was the x64 “ahs” one, comes with xfce desktop. The other available flavors are KDE and fluxbox, I've no experience with either of those desktops, besides installing KDE out of curiosity, booting it once and witnessing it break bluetooth and other DE specific things, and then never booting with it again. There are some other desktops ready to install from the mx installer, see the pic. https://mxlinux.org/download-links/
Trying to list out things from memory that I've done on this installation over the years to make it work the way I want:
Kernel: I upgraded to the "Liquorix" kernel through the MX Package Installer some years ago to get something wine related working, FSync or something. Currently running 6.5.11-3-liquorix-amd64
Wine: Trying to set up wine with dependencies on a fresh linux install in 2018 with no prior experience with a package manager or the terminal was not a great experience. After enabling 32-bit packages I ended up in dependency hell for a while, I remember that installing steam pulled in alot of dependencies that wine needed to function. If I had to set up everything wine related from scratch now on a fresh install after five years of experience, I could probably do it in an hour without issues
Graphics drivers: After dealing with outdated mesa packages conflicting with something I was trying to do, I ended up doing something taboo: Utilizing a third party ubuntu ppa to get the latest mesa packages: https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa After finding out what debian version my release of mx was based on, I looked at which ubuntu release corresponded with that debian version. At the moment it's focal. And at the moment, it just works. I have a RX 6650 XT
Audio: After witnessing the earrape that the "flat volumes" feature in pulseaudio causes out of the box, I had to find out how to disable it. I later replaced pulseaudio with pipewire using the pipewire-setup-mx package from the mx test repo, allowing me to use the SBC-XQ bluetooth codec with my cheap bluetooth earphones. I also installed JamesDSP from https://github.com/Audio4Linux/JDSP4Linux to get equalizer and crossfeed effects.
This is the first time I've tried to write up anything comprehensive about my experience with linux, so I might have forgotten something.