When I moved my desktop PC from Windows to Linux a few months ago, the Linux distribution I picked was MX Linux. In this post I explain why.
What’s a Linux distribution?
In case you’re new to Linux and don’t know what a “distribution” is:
A Linux distribution, often shortened to “distro,” is a packaged version of Linux that comes with the Linux kernel plus a collection of software and utilities that make the OS functional and user-friendly.
If you want to know more, here are a few resources to get you up started, with the quote above coming from the first one in this list:
What are Linux Distributions? – quickly covers the basics
Linux DISTRIBUTION: explained [Video, 5min] – covers the basics
What Is Linux? - Explained for Beginners [Video, 8min] – goes into a little more detail, which is useful
How do you choose a Linux distro?
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of blog posts, articles, and videos on how to choose a Linux distro that’ll work best for you.
Here are two good articles:
And if you’re already familiar with Linux, here’s an excellent interactive guide (available in 19 languages, no less!) that walks your through the process:
Most of these resources ask you to consider a bunch of factors that will help you create a short list of distros to try.
Narrowing down the list of suitable distros
I used a combined list of those decision-factors to add and remove distros from my eventual shortlist.
My level of experience with Linux: intermediate-to-advanced. I have enough experience with Linux that I am comfortable diagnosing issues and looking/asking for help. This let me keep specialised and potentially complicated distros in my list.
Effort I want to make in building and maintaining my system: low-to-medium. Even though I can, I don’t want to do lots of tinkering and exploring with my operating system (OS). I just want my OS to disappear into the background while I do other things. Because of this, I removed most specialised and complicated distros from my list.
Package management preference, if any: ideally, APT. This let me remove all Arch-based distros from my shortlist, for example (though that was partly also in response to the effort question, above).
Operating system look-and-feel (eg for people new to Linux, we ask: Windows-like or Mac-like?): Windows-like, though highly customisable. Basically, I wanted to use KDE Plasma as my desktop environment. I kind of also didn’t have a choice because, unlike GNOME and Cinnamon, KDE does an actually good job with fractional scaling (eg scaling the whole screen up to 125%) and I needed this functionality for my laptop. [1]
Hardware compatibility requirements (especially if you have much older or much newer hardware): mixed. My desktop computer is only a year old, with an NVIDIA RTX4080 graphics card, so I needed a distro that could support recent hardware. This removed a bunch if distros from contention. My desktop is also attached to an ultra-widescreen monitor that supports high dynamic range (HDR) colour. I was hoping to find a distro that could take full advantage of this capability but, sadly, that was not to be and I’ve had to switch my monitor to its standard dynamic range (SDR) mode. My peripherals, on the other hand, are either older or more readily compatible with Linux so none of those were an issue. Finally, I wanted to run the same distro on my desktop and my laptop, but my laptop is an older (2021), refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad so that was never going to pose any compatibility issues.
Software compatibility requirements (only really relevant if you’re a gamer, coder, multimedia creator, or other type of specialist user; or someone with specific accessibility requirements): gamer/multimedia creator. I wanted the ability to play games through Steam (nothing very new or resource-intensive) and the ability to do multimedia editing (audio, video, photography). I didn’t need a gaming- or multimedia-focused distro to do all this though, so these requirements didn’t add or remove anything from the list.
Default software preferences: none. I’m happy to install all the software I need (ie I don’t need my distro to pre-install anything for me), so this preference didn’t add or remove anything from the list either.
Distro community size (aka your potential tech support needs, because larger and more well-known distros tend to have more users, a wider install base, and more online answers to questions you might have along the way): medium-to-large. Because my desktop hardware is relatively new, I knew I’d need a bit of support for it, so I wanted a more tried-and-true distro. This eliminated a bunch of smaller distros. Though, as luck would have it, I’d end up eliminating almost all the super-popular distros for other reasons. Oh well.
System stability (which basically boils down the the choice between a super stable OS or one that gets more frequent OS and software updates): more stable than not. I like using the latest and greatest software and hardware, but I don’t need to do so. And while I didn’t particularly want to be on an Long Term Support (LTS) release schedule, which is typically on a two-year cycle, I also didn’t want to be on a rolling release, in which new features added as soon as they’re stable enough.
FOSS ideological preferences: no strong preference. I prefer to use free and open-source (FOSS) software over proprietary software whenever I can, but I’m perfectly happy to use proprietary software as well.
Big-tech ideological preferences: avoid big-tech as much as possible. I’m trying hard to stay away from “big tech” as much as I can – that term being relative in the Linux world. I don’t like larger companies that enshittify their products or try to throw their weight around in the community. This basically meant avoiding Canonical, and therefore all flavours of Ubuntu, and IBM-owned Red Hat, which makes only enterprise versions of Linux so none of their products were in contention anyway. (openSUSE is the only large tech company in the Linux space that I like.)
Willingness to pay: happy to. Almost all end-user Linux distros are free, but a couple charge an optional small amount to help fund their development and I’m someone who regularly provides financial support to the software and online services that I use. So when I came across a Zorin OS Pro – a very polished, very Windows-like distro that charges an optional one-time payment of AUD $78 – it jumped to the top of my list before being quickly eliminated because it uses GNOME and not KDE. Oh well.
Privacy preferences: consumer-level strict. Most Linux distros offer great privacy, but a handful connect to third-parties or collect telemetry data, meaning they have the ability to track how you’re using your computer. I absolutely do not want to use technology that tracks me, but I’m also not a privacy nut – meaning I’m not going to use Tails or Kali Linux, which I would say are “professional-level strict” with their privacy and security. This basically just meant that I eliminated all the distros created by Canonical.
Creating my shortlist
Since the KDE Plasma desktop environment is such a foundational part of my requirements, I first searched for the most recommended KDE-based distros [2] and came up with this initial shortlist – though each entry came with caveats:
Kubuntu. Kubuntu is a Canonical product so I couldn’t use it out of the box. I’d have to run some post-install scripts to get rid of snap package support and Canonical’s telemetry.
TUXEDO OS. This distro is made for TUXEDO branded computers but the OS itself can be installed on other computers as well.
openSUSE Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is a rolling release, but it is a very stable one so I’m okay with that. However its package manager is Zypper (which uses RPM packages) and not APT (which uses DEB packages) so that’d be a bit of a compromise.
Fedora KDE. Fedora has a fixed release cycle (updated every six months) and uses the DNF package manager (which uses RPM packages) so not exactly what I was after. Also it doesn’t have great support for newer hardware and proprietary software. But this is a distro I used for many years on my old laptop, so it’s something I’m quite familiar with.
My initial shortlist was concerning because the first distro is created by Canonical (which I’m trying to avoid) and the last two distros use RPM packages (which some of the software I want to use doesn’t have support for), leaving me with just a single option – which isn’t a short list as such.
So after searching for more recommended KDE-based distros, and then going through the long list of factors above and slightly relaxing one or two of my requirements (ie allowing for less well-known and less frequently-updated distros), I added two other distros to my final shortlist:
Nitrux OS. Nitrux has a smaller install base and is based on Debian.
MX Linux. MX has a medium-sized install base and is also based on Debian.
The cool thing with both distros is that they’re based on Debian and not Ubuntu. There are many, many Debian guides and resources out there so, even if I couldn’t find a specific Nitrux OS or MX Linux guide for any issue I might have, there’s a good change I’d find a Debian-specific guide instead.
Oh, and before you ask: I didn’t shortlist Debian itself because of its slower, two-year release cycle. I wanted something with at least slightly more frequent releases, which MX Linux has with its point releases.
Photo by Kevin Horvat on Unsplash
Testing my shortlist
The cool thing with Linux is that you don’t have to rely on other people’s opinions on which distro will work best for you.
Yes, you can watch a tonne of review and comparison videos, but you can – and you should – just run each distro off a “live USB” (aka bootable USB) and try it out for yourself.
You can then install all your distros – either one after the other or in all of them parallel on the same computer or same live USB – and play around with them for a bit before committing to the one you like best.
So that’s what I set out to do.
Happily (or unhappily, depending on how you look at it) just the live-USB step eliminated three of distros:
Fedora KDE wouldn’t even boot! I installed its bootable ISO to multiple USB sticks using different installers (Fedora Media Writer, balenaEtcher, and Rufus). These USBs booted-up just fine on my laptop, but none of them worked on my desktop. I don’t know what the hardware compatibility issue was, but I didn’t want to spend time figuring it out.
TUXEDO OS booted up properly, but it ran slowly and kept crashing – likely another, though different, compatibility issue with my desktop hardware.
openSUSE Tumbleweed booted, but it didn’t recognise my screen’s resolution and the OS installer wouldn’t launch from within the live USB. This didn’t give me much confidence in its ability to run on my desktop’s hardware.
As for the rest:
Nitrux OS I eliminated because it is planning to drop KDE Plasma in the future. I never even ran its live USB version.
Like Fedora’s KDE “spin”, MX Linux’s KDE version also didn’t boot. But I was told it was easy enough to install its flagship Xfce version and then just switch to KDE afterwards, so I didn’t immediately eliminate this option.
Kubuntu booted up easily and worked flawlessly. But I knew that if I was going to use it, I’d have to rip out its guts and modify how it worked. And, honestly, I didn’t have the energy to do that. I’d wanted my OS installation and maintenance to be easy, remember? So while I mostly-eliminated this option, I did keep it as last-resort compromise if literally nothing else worked.
Getting MX Linux to work
To recap, after my initial round of testing and elimination, MX Linux was the last distro standing and I was determined to make it work for me.
So I installed the Xfce desktop version of MX Linux and, lo and behold, it worked perfectly and installed without a hitch. I immediately installed the KDE desktop on top of this, and that installed just fine too. Success!
But then I restarted my computer and it wouldn’t boot, screeching to a halt at the same spot in the boot-up process where the MX Linux KDE live USB crashed. Great.
The irritating thing was that the MX Linux KDE distro worked beautifully on my ThinkPad laptop, and even on my older gaming laptop with an NVIDIA GPU, so I knew the issue was with my desktop’s relatively newer hardware.
It took a couple of hours, but I finally figured out the problem: my desktop’s hardware absolutely does not support SDDM, the Simple Desktop Display Manager that launches the log-in screen. MX Linux’s Xfce desktop environment worked perfect because it uses the LightDM display manager. When I’d installed KDE on top of MX Linux earlier, I’d been given the option to switch display managers to SDDM and, since SDDM is the recommended display manager for KDE, I had said yes. *sigh* [3]
So I reinstalled MX Linux with Xfce, reinstalled the KDE desktop, but this time did not switch away from LightDM. And everything worked!
That’s where I am now: running MX Linux with the KDE Plasma desktop environment. Yes, the KDE Plasma that comes with MX Linux is the older 5.27 version (compared to its current 6.4 version) but everything runs beautifully and I’m loving my set-up!
MX Linux with a KDE Plasma desktop running on my computer with an ultra widescreen monitor (3840×166px).
Keeping MX Linux running
Has it been smooth sailing with MX Linux over the last few months? For the most part, yes! I haven’t wanted or needed to switch back to Windows 11 even once.
In fact, the Windows software I thought I’d miss the most works perfectly well on my set up via Wine (a Windows emulation layer that you can “install” Windows software in Linux).
The only issue I’ve had is with Linux software that relies on the systemd initialisation system to set things up. MX Linux doesn’t use systemd any more, though you can switch to its systemd version at boot time, if needed. But that’s okay, it was easy to find alternative software that didn’t rely on systemd.
It did, of course, take a while to get everything set up the way I like. But I took extensive notes and kept a detail log of every bit of software I installed and every configuration change I made, so I’ve been able to replicate this set-up on my laptop as well. Now my system is running exactly how I want it to on both computers.
To keep things fun, I did install openSUSE Tumbleweed on my older gaming laptop and I’m having fun playing around with that set-up – especially since that does have the latest version of KDE Plasma installed.
What next?
So what’s next in my desktop Linux journey? Not much on the OS side, actually. (Though I do want to keep playing around with openSUSE on my older laptop.)
All the work I need to do is on the software side, and that’s mainly finding Linux alternatives to Windows software and then using these alternatives till I’m as proficient as I was before I made the switch.
It did take me a while to figure out my new file storage, back-up, and cloud-sync strategy though, but I’ll talk about all that in future blog posts :)
For now I’m just going to enjoy doing things on my computer while the OS fades into the background without spying on me and tracking my every move. Woohoo!
[1] I wanted to use the same distro on my desktop and my laptop. I had Linux Mint installed on my laptop for the longest time, but Cinnamon’s poorly-implemented fractional scaling was really starting to grate on me me so I’d gone back to 100% scaling. (When I scaled my screen up to 125% or 150%, YouTube videos wouldn’t play properly and playing those videos would max-out CPU resources.) I really like Linux Mint and would use it everywhere if I could, and since it’s basically a version of Ubuntu without all of Canonical’s crap shoved into it, it works perfectly on all my hardware. The only thing that stops me from using Linux Mint is that it no longer supports KDE. It now comes with its own Cinnamon desktop, which is based on GNOME. Yes, you can install KDE on Linux Mint afterwards, but I’d much rather use a distro that supports KDE officially.
[2] In case you’re wondering, these were the most-recommended KDE distros that I eliminated straight away for various reasons: KDE Neon because it isn’t particularly stable, nor is it meant to be; KaOS because it’s a rolling release, which I’d rather not use; and CatchyOS, EndeavourOS, Garuda Linux, and Manjaro because they’re all based on Arch.
[3] Fedora uses the SDDM display manager, which is potentially why its live USB never even booted on my desktop. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
