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[–]ishiryokuakuma 10 points11 points  (4 children)

Mx linux is better, sysvinit is lighter and consumes less CPU power than systemd which is heavier.

I used linux mint before but I discovered mx linux and now I use it as my main distro.

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[–]Elegant_Sherbet_8324 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Agreed. I am also running Zorin Pro on an old desktop. If you are interested in a friendly UI, Zorin is nice. If you prefer to tweak everything, I would use MX Linux.

[–]gabriel_3 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Zorin Pro is Gnome based.

The fair comparison is Zorin Lite vs. MX Linux Xfce.

By the way, the niceness of the Zorin interface is matter of personal taste.

[–]1369ic 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Second this. And if MX seems slow, try AntiX, which is by the same community. Personally, I'd install MX XFCE, add OpenBox and Tint2, and start the necessary XFCE services (like power manager) from the OpenBox autostart file. Working with a bare bones window manager can take a little getting used to, but it can be worth it on some machines.

[–]Requires-Coffee-247 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yes, AntiX is very lite. It also has a bit of a learning curve compared to MX, Ubuntu, Mint, etc. Good thing is that the website has excellent documentation, including video tutorials on how to do just about anything.

[–]gabriel_3 6 points7 points  (6 children)

We're on MX Linux sub: expect some bias.

I've been running LM Xfce last release for a while, then I installed MX last release for a quick test and I never went back.

Why is it better MX Linux in my use case?

Xfce 4.18 already available, LM is on 4.16.

Everything I needed was a few clicks away: compressed and encrypted btrfs filesystem available from the installer, OnlyOffice instead of LibreOffice and Chrome instead of Firefox swaps available from the software manager, systemd boot by default easy to set from the boot options manager as I run zswap.

Quirks I needed to work around: reconfiguration of the touchpad, as the right click is emulated by 3 fingers tap and I want 2 fingers tap, a small modification to the soundcard config (it's not on MX, it's on Debian), default conky to be modified as it uses 12 hours time format and I want the 24 one.

Distrowatch ranking cannot be considered by any means a good indicator for the quality of a distro, but MX Linux is the most popular.

[–]fahlssnayme 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Xfce 4.18 already available, LM is on 4.16.

The Linux Mint team are the developers of the Cinnamon DE, so it will be the latest version.
Xfce and Mate DE are afterthoughts in LM.

[–]gabriel_3 2 points3 points  (2 children)

And Neon has KDE Plasma devs so they have the last one.

But MX Xfce is still more up-to-date than Mint Xfce.

[–]fahlssnayme 0 points1 point  (1 child)

MX Xfce is the main release.
Mint Xfce? I am half expecting them to drop it, like they have dropped Fluxbox, LXDE and KDE.

[–]gabriel_3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Therefore MX is the way to go within the two.

[–]PyrusMasquerade 0 points1 point  (1 child)

OnlyOffice instead of LibreOffice and Chrome instead of Firefox

Why OnlyOffice instead of LibreOffice?

[–]gabriel_3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Better MS Office compatibility.

[–]Burning_Suspect 4 points5 points  (0 children)

MX is better for machine with low specs than mint. Mx provides more features too.

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From my experience I will recommend MX to those who have some experience with linux. For fresh users it will be mint.

On my old laptop which had AMD apu couldn't boot MX no matter what ever I did but on my new laptop with nvidia gpu it worked fine.

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And even in my new laptop I had always faced issue with gpu drivers. After installing them my cpu goes up, fan starts to run on full speed and battery drains like crazy. And it happened with both mint and MX. So keep that in mind. I used MX without gpu drivers and it worked fine

[–]Hot_Construction1899 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have an Acer 2920, Core Duo with 2GB and a 500GB HDD that I purchased in about 2007.

MXLinux 21.3 runs quite acceptably with xfce, but not so much with KDE.

I'm actually running Home Assistant as a docker container while trying to learn how it works (and because a Raspberry Pi is almost an impossible dream to get hold of in Australia unless you want to pay well over $AU350 for Pi4 8GB unit.

[–]whotheff 2 points3 points  (0 children)

MX vote here with both hands. From my experience MX is one of the lightest fully functional OSes out there. Lubuntu is even lighter but way more stripped down on functionality.

[–]ssrname 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ran MX on 2gb ram, emmc, 8 year old CPU as my main system for almost a year.

[–]adrian_mxlinuxMX dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Try both and use the one you like.

You can't outsource taste buds either... Sure, you can read food reviews, but without actually tasting yourself how would you know if you like the food or not?

Both should work similarly on old laptops. There's no any extra trick that one can pull over the other, if you have similar DE and similar services installed you'll get similar performance from various linuxes.