MX Linux 21 Beta Release! - Most Popular Linux Distro?

hello everybody this is tech cut in this video what we're going to be doing is taking a look at the newly released mx linux 21 beta this is the very first beta release for the 21 version that is going to be based off of debian 11 bullseye and that is one of the cool things about mx linux is it's not just another ubuntu based distribution they completely skip that step and go straight basing off a debian so that makes it awesome so first we're going to talk about what's new then we're going to talk about why for some reason it's ranked number one on distro watch and then we're going to dive into the system and do just a general overview of what's going on so first what is new in this beta release of mx linux 21. now other than some basic application additions and updates a major focus of this beta is actually going to be on the new uefi live boot menus so now you could select all your live boot options from the boot menus instead of having to use the system console menus additionally when you install it they've added lvm support in the partition selection area but at the moment this really only works if a lvm partition already exists i'm assuming that they're going to later on add full lvm support so you can make lvm partitions through this and doing this is a good first step but that last thing is just me kind of speculating now another change in the system is the super user password is going to be required so your user password is going to be required whenever you do any administrative tasks and they actually added an option within the mx linux tweak tool to go ahead and enable or disable this if you see fit but we're gonna look more at the mx tweak tool when we go ahead and do our general overview of the system and finally there's a lot of general configuration changes and you're gonna primarily notice this within the actual panels of xfce as well as the default panel plugins that they went ahead and decided to use with this release now one thing you may have noticed if you follow mx linux at all is there was no version 20 and you may be asking yourself why is that and the simple answer is they use their major release versions based off of the year that it's released such as this is 21 this is year 2021 the last version was 2019 that was year 2019 and being that they're going off of these major debian releases if debian doesn't have a major release neither is mx linux and that is why we have that missed version and that takes us to why is mx linux so popular and the easiest answer for that is it's it's not i mean it's definitely popular a lot of people know about it a lot of people use it but it's not nearly to the level that something like ubuntu fedora even maybe manjaro is that when it comes to actual daily users the only reason why people believe that this is the most popular linux distribution is because of those distro watch rankings and the distro watch rankings really are not that accurate they go off of hits so how many people view the specific page about that linux distribution and if something's number one and you've never heard of it of course you're gonna click it and check it out and i believe a lot of that is what drives it up and keeps it at the top and another reason why we don't get too much accurate data on actual distribution usage when it comes to the overall linux community is because we don't share that data that's one of the reasons why a lot of people use linux is they don't want to share that data with the developers with any other companies or anything like that so no matter what we look at nothing's gonna be a hundred percent accurate in the actual use case for linux distributions now there's a couple better sources if you wanted to get a better idea of what linux distributions actually rank the highest uh one of them is google trends for example number one on that is ubuntu followed by centos debian and so on and then the next is going to be the steam rankings or there are hardware and software surveys i have that open here according to them about well just under twenty percent of people are using ubuntu with steam which isn't surprising at all followed up by mandarin linux at just under 12 percent pure arch linux at just above 10 percent that's kind of surprising to me because this is at like one percent usage and that's actually quite a few people just using arch next up is the latest version of pop os and then we have another version of ubuntu at almost seven percent so that takes the total ubuntu usage to over a quarter of all linux users on steam so is mx linux the most popular linux distribution no it is not but that doesn't mean it is a wonderful linux distribution and that is what we're gonna do right now we're gonna go ahead and jump onto the system check out some of the new updates that we talked about as well as just go with a general overview of the system all right so now we're booted into the live disk for mx linux and some of the things i'm noticing right off the bat compared to last time i used this as one the taskbar is off to the side the background is absolutely beautiful and i do love some of the plug-ins that they went with with this new beta on this welcome screen we see some easy links so we could get the frequently asked questions user manuals wiki tools tweaks and a couple other things we're going to be getting into that in just a little bit what we're going to focus on first is actually the installation process so we're just going to go ahead and use this welcome screen to click the install mx linux link so right here is the installer and you can see that it is an independent linux distribution based on debian stable this is their terms of use just gives you some info gives you some general instructions and limitations here is where you go to change your keyboard settings but what we're going to go ahead and do is click on next here is the type of installation you can see right now i am in virtualbox so i'm going to go ahead and make sure that is selected use the entire disk and right here we can't really see that lvm thing or the new lvm support at the moment because i don't have any lvm partitions so for now we're just going to have to go ahead and hit next but you do have the option to encrypt here if you'd like to as well for now i'm not going to do that select yes and here we have the option for your boot method while we're doing this you can see that they've already began formatting and going through the installation process so let's install grub keep everything at default hit next and here we have our computer name generally when i set up a linux distribution i like to name my computer after the distribution just so it says like my name at distribution so we'll go mx linux for this and we have the domain and we're going to go ahead and keep all this at the default go ahead and go next and here you have some of your local and time zone settings i am in the united states it doesn't have a map or anything like that but it's it's fairly easy to figure out i'm gonna go over to the los angeles time zone no i do not live in los angeles we're gonna go with the 24-hour clock and here you have some service settings advanced so if you want to go ahead and go in there you can select various packages that you want to enable or disable such as cups for printing certain hardware things you can enable or disable through here but you can see that everything is selected from default and that's probably what you would want to go with so now we can go next next and here is our user account stuff so we're just going to go ahead and set this up my default login will be brandon it's probably going to ask me to lower case that so we'll go just like that and then fill in your passwords i just did the same password for both root and default otherwise i'll probably forget it i'm not going to show the password i'm not going to auto login and we can go ahead and hit next and here you'll have some tips for getting help as well as links to their website repairing your installation this is going to just cycle through it's going way too quick to actually read so that's something they might want to change and when the installation is complete you will see this screen right here you have the option to automatically reboot the system so we're just going to hit finish and then it's going to go ahead and do that system reboot for us all right so this is our first boot into mx linux it's not too different than what we just saw in our live session but this time what we're going to do is spend a little bit more time looking at some of the custom mx tools that they have for us so first of all in this little welcome screen we have tools here they have other things like we mentioned popular apps codecs things like that but if you go ahead and click on this link it opens up your mx tools and this is awesome because it basically extends or expands your settings option especially for somebody who's new to linux something like this is absolutely magnificent so we have the live usb maker so a usb flasher tool you could do snapshots through here you have a ton of system maintenance things such as cleanup uh boot options so for example if i went to this one thing you do see this little pop-up dialogue i'm going to talk about that more in just a sec once we get into the tweak tool but authenticate and then you have your mx boot options here and you can see my kernel parameters i have it set to 1080p out of the gate that's something that you could do and that's for a virtual box so just the fact they had that was awesome and when i booted into it because of their new uh boot menu options i was actually able to set this up right out of the gate you probably saw that as an overlay in the beginning of this video and of course you have other options such as background splash screen messages things like that so that's just one example of some of the things that you could go ahead and play around with this uh menu editors under setup you have about linux so if you open that up you get a little bit more information about what you're currently in so you can see we have the debian version the mx version the support version desktops this is running xfce 4.16 out of the gate i'm going to go ahead and back out of that you see that that just opened up that about tab so we're going to open our tool thing back up we have codex installer which is nice that's one of the things you're probably going to want to do when you first install linux uh welcome screen system sound time and date con key just anything you'd expect to be able to go ahead and easily modify is very nicely laid out here for you quick system info format usb and you have the idevice mounter what the idevice mounter is is another cool tool i don't really have an iphone with me to go ahead and demonstrate this but this is their own mx tool that makes it really easy to mount your iphone to pull pictures and other things out of it so that is a very handy tool if you are an iphone user but if you go right here we have the tweak tool you could access it through here or accessing access it through searching through your menu but if we go ahead and open that up you can see our mx tweak tool so here we have our effects panel we have it set vertically so you could go ahead and change this if you'd like to or you could display it horizontally so if i applied this we can throw our bar on the bottom there but for now i'm going to go ahead and keep it as the default so you do have some really easy ways to go ahead and change some of your xfce settings through here as well as your themes your compositors so you can see we're using the xfce compositor you have some quick options for your display settings i'm currently at 1080p some config options and right here this is a new thing is the password for administrative tasks this is a new feature in this beta you can set this to user or root so you saw that password come up when i tried to open up the boot settings that is one way to enable or disable that and here you have quick access to certain xfce settings such as your panel window manager and appearance for example if i click appearance you can see i have my style icons fonts and general settings i haven't really opened up anything so let's go ahead and pop open h-top to see what's going on looks like we're only using 552 megabytes of system memory out of the gate which re it's pretty good for xfce it's actually normal but compared to a lot of systems this is very nice and with that the cpu usage um at idle is fairly low you see it's jumping in between zero and two percent which again is normal 107 tasks running in the background uh let's go ahead and just i could have just hit f10 or something but let's go ahead and open up a terminal emulator and let's use this to type in neo fetch you can see right here they have some custom bash scripting so that's nice so neo fetch let's see if it's installed out of the gate which it is you can see they didn't try to replace their own thing right here they're just using debian because this is just a ultimately an xfce front for debian with a whole bunch of tools added but this is running xfce 4.16 with the xfwm4 window manager the kernel with this is 5.10 which is what is going to ship with this version of debian you can see right here the os is deneb denim denaby and gnu slash linux 11 so they're not really hiding the fact that it's debian at all that a lot of linux distributions do or whatever they're forking off of they're saying this is ultimately debian all right so that is going to conclude our video i do thank you for watching uh if you couldn't tell this video was slightly edited down a little bit i actually recorded this during a live stream so if you're interested in checking that out you go ahead and click the little i above in the corner and watch the full live stream there's time stamps so you could go ahead and uh skip through that if you would like to additionally link down below i will have the article and the download link so you could try out this beta of mx linux if you would like to but now i would like to give a special shout out and thank you to the youtube members and patreon supporters michael valentino is a producer one of the highest tier supporters so i do thank you very much all the other supporters you can see on the screen right there thank you everybody if you are interested in becoming a patreon or a youtube member one patreon link in the description uh youtube you can click the little join button right down below there if you're subscribed or you might not have to be but that'd be kind of silly but if you become a patreon that uh if you become a youtube member you get like emojis and other cool things like that uh anything i post to youtube members exclusively will get posted over to patreon so it just depends on what platform you prefer uh with all that said make sure you're subscribed and you ring that bell so you do not miss any future uploads like i said everything linked down below um yeah have a beautiful day and good bye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 22,987

Keywords: linux, linux tutorial, desktop enviorment, xfce, mx linux, debian

Id: Qd47Q1eDsd0

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2021