MX Linux 21.2: Middleweight Debian-based distro is well worth a look There are so many Debian derivatives out there that a few months ago, we did a roundup that compared some of the leading ones. We mentioned antiX and MX Linux, saying that we planned to come back and give MX a fuller review. The project just put out its second point-release of 2022, which seemed like a good time to do so. …
"*Effectively* systemd-free", then -- as in, the thing is present but you don't have to deal with it. And, as the story makes clear, it's only there so you don't have to deal with its absence. Best of both worlds, it seems to me. (That such a kludge is necessary(ish) is deplorable, but that's the world we live in.)
I suppose one could say that MX Linux contains systemd the way Salk vaccine contains poliovirus :-)
I recommend you to explore the MX tools more thoroughly: they are amazingly useful.
My personal favourite allows you to easily create a portable, persistent clone of your
own tweaked MX operating system on a USB stick: this works when plugged into almost
any computer capable of booting from USB. And it does not touch the machine's native
system unless you want it to.
Not NVIDIA, it's udev (or systemd-udevd) that many things depend upon.
Systemd sucked the independent udev into systemd thus making some traces of systemd almost essential for a modern working system. Gentoo forked udev at this stage (called it eudev) and maintain a fully systemd-free udev equivalent.
Thanks for this analysis. In the last few months, on my 2008 vintage Thinkpad, I have moved from (previously long-term) Mint XFCE to Zorin OS lite to Linux Lite and now, on the basis of your article, I have just installed MX Linux 21. My impression, after an hour or so of playing, is that this distro meets my needs better than all the previous installations. I am most assuredly not a Linux technical expert, but MX linux installed in a most straight forward way on my dual boot Thinkpad with no glitches apparent so far. Yours was, for me, an excellent recommendation.
IMO this is absolutely none of the business of the virtualized OS aside from a small handful of niche performance cases. It should be the sole responsibility of the virtualization system to deal with keyboard/mouse capture, video passthough/emulation and so on. Sadly I seem to hold a minority opinion on this.
So I'm a long long time Unix/Linux guy, and I've got a home server with lots of memory/cpu for my main usage, and a desktop which I feel like I can blow away at need because I mount my home directory to it via NFS. These days this seems like a good idea, especially if you use brtfs anywhere. I've had horrible luck with SUSE servers using this and trying to upgrade. I had to blow one away completely because the snapshots got corrupted and nothing I could do would let me get back to a stable situation.
But anyway.... what do people with multiple systems at home do for their home directory setup? I like sharing it via NFS, but this doesn't work on a laptop I might take elsehwere. And then I have to remember which apps/settings I need to copy over to get something hopefully workable on the laptop. It's a pain. Been thinking of looking at Unision, but not sure it's the right solution either, since I doubt I want my laptop's files to really overwrite by main server files willy-nilly. Which is why I like NFS, because they're the same files no matter what.
And of course in $WORK we run Netapp filers and the computes all NFS mount tools/home/data directories. This is something that alot of vendors seem to have gotten away from since this isn't the "lone developer on his laptop" model 95% of all installs are done for. Except in large engineering/compute clusters.
It's a laws-of-physics thing: if you want to allow completely disconnected operation (when the "server" is not reachable) then the local copy may change. If the central copy also changes during this time, then you have a split-brain situation.
Unison doesn't overwrite willy-nilly. If both sides diverge, the divergent files are left as-is until you force a sync in one direction or another.
Syncthing is more modern and worth trying out: it's very strong on both encryption and NAT-busting. If you make divergent changes, then you'll end up with extra copies of the files with extra characters in the names. There's an android client too.
MX Linux is worth much more than just a look. I've used this distro for a few years now and found out that it's just as good - if not better and more functional - than Windows 11. After using Redhat, SUSE, Fedora, Manjaro, and the not-so-ready-for-prime-time Linux Mint, I think MX Linux should be the choice for Linux users. Ninety nine Linux distros listed below MX Linux, in my opinion, should be tossed in the garbage, but then, what will the Distrowatch maintainers do? :(
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