MX Linux 21 | One Of The Best XFCE Distros

okay welcome to another video so the popular debian based distribution mx linux have just released their first beta to the newest version of 21 which is what we're going to be checking out today so before we jump into the live environment and get this installed read a little bit from the release announcement and then we'll get straight into it so they currently have 32-bit and 64-bit versions for their flagship desktop environment of xfce with the 5.10 kernel so mx21 is built from debian bullseye and the mx repositories so what's new in the first beta new and updated applications a new installer partition selection area including some lvm support if lvm volume exists already okay new uefi live system boot menus now you can select your live boot options for example persistence from the boot menu and sub menus or rather than using the previous console menus the version of xfce that's going to be shipped is version 4.16 use the password sudo for admin tasks by default you can switch this in mx tweak other tab many small configuration changes particularly on the panel with new default panel plugins and that's something i'm definitely interested in checking out i've always quite liked the way they've set up their panels on mx linux with this beta release we are particularly interested in testing the new uefi live system boot menus as well as testing the installer virtualbox testing is welcome but we are looking for edge cases on real hardware for the most part and like we always do on our videos we are going to be installing natively on real hardware so like with all baiters there are some known issues so the wallpaper is a little busy and the current con key gets washed out a little it looks better on some screens than on others and that will all be worked out after they've chosen their new default wallpaper now the next applies to the 32-bit iso only there is an error message when you boot the iso in virtualbox also the virtualbox guest additions are not pre-installed and again that's on the 32-bit iso only mx package installer so the test repo and back port tabs will not display anything for obvious reasons as the repos don't exist or are empty at this time now they've only got the xft version ready at the moment but also planned are the kde plasma ahs xfc and fluxbox based releases now the iso for this is about 1.8 gb in size and with that being said let's jump into the live environment and get this installed so here we are in the boot menu for the mx linux 21 iso and as you can see under advanced options we can now do the persistence options as well as the boot options of fail safe options and then get back into the console options or disable the grub theme so we'll go back to the main menu and boot straight into the live environment right so here we are in the live environment for mx linux 21 of wild flower and like they mentioned in the release announcement the wallpaper really does clash quite severely with the concrete widget there making it very hard to read the information that's displayed but once they've chosen a new default wallpaper that will all be fixed in the final release so what we're going to do is go straight into install mx linux from the welcome screen and get this set up okay so first things first i'm just going to change my keyboard settings it's currently on us so i'm going to go to change keyboard settings i'm going to go to plus layout english uk no variant we'll leave it like so and i'm just going to remove the us keyboard entirely apply okay and now as you can see the layout has changed to gb so we can go to the next step right so we've got a couple of options here we can do a regular install using the entire disk or we can customize the disk layout and create the partitions ourselves we're going to go for the regular install using the entire disk and see how it sets it all up for us and what partitions of layout is going to be using and we're going to be doing it on device sdb which is the samsung ssd 860 evo m.2 next so is it okay to form and use the entire disk it is indeed so here we can see we can install grub for linux and windows we only have linux on this machine so we're not too worried about that and then the location to install on we can do mbr pbr or of course esp and then the partition it's going to use is from sdb1 so the same drive that we're installing on of a little sort of 256 mb fat 32 partition next so i'm not too worried about that for now so we'll leave that like so and go to the next step and as you can see as well it's already started actually doing the installation so it's a very quick installation process of mx linux now for local we are going to want to change that to united kingdom and we're also going to want to change my time zone to europe london all looks good and now we can go to the next step which is going to be your user accounts and root passwords let's just go and call this one tyler type in our default password and we'll do the same for the root password and then as you can see just beneath that we've got a few different options and one really cool option is actually the option to save live desktop changes so any changes we make to our desktop and the installation process in the live environment will then be saved and applied to our sort of a fresh setup when we offer the installed which is very cool but the only one i'm going to select for now is the auto login so we don't have to go to the login screen every time we start up and next okay that's everything i'm going to pause the video here and then we'll come back once it's finished and there we go and that really did take no time whatsoever on my machine finishing in just a few minutes let's reboot and check out our freshly installed mx linux 201 right so here we are and we are greeted with the mx21 wildflower welcome screen now before we go through any of that there are some updates that we need to grab here so we can see in a little indicator so let's right click and go to view and upgrade and see how much we're going to be updating so 55 upgraded and we need to get 101 mb of archives just go ahead and press upgrade and it will ask you for your pseudo password and then what i'll do here is pause the video and come back once it's finished okay so we're all up to date and should be good to go so we'll start with the welcome screen but we won't spend too much time here but in the welcome screen we do have quick links to their faq users manual the wiki tools and then we also have the tweak panel which is where you can change the default layout of the panel and something quite cool that mx do is if you was to decide to do that it will make a backup of your sort of current or default layout so you can quickly and easily restore it to the one you had set previously but we'll go through mx tweak in just a moment we didn't have links to forums and videos contribute codecs and popular apps now in the other tab of about here you can get a bit of system information so the desktop you're currently using as well as the distribution and then you get some sort of system information like your cpu etc so we can see that we are using mx21 the debian version underpinning everything is version 11.0 the desktop is of course xse version 4.16.0 and this is all supported until june 2024 so the default shell is of course bash and mxnx uses x11 as its default session type now what we're going to do is spend a little bit of time on the default layout of the desktop and how it's all set up but for those of you do want to see what this actual conkey widget looks like i've grabbed a couple of different wallpapers just to quickly change to so we can see what's going on until they've chosen the new default wallpaper because as you can see in the default backgrounds folder that is the only one that we currently have so if we go to our pictures folder we do have one here and that should make things a little bit easier to see so it's quite a nice simple looking widget with just the current date and time as well as some system information for your hdd memory and a cpu let's go back to the default wallpaper and keep it moving now if we right click on our desktop we get quite a few nice options in our right click on menu here so we can create a launcher create a folder document and all of that good stuff we can open a terminal here and we can also create a sim link here but we also have the option to go through all of our desktop applications from here as well as opposed to always going to our whisker menu which is bound to your left super key now mx linux is one of the distributions that really did help quite popularize that everything happens on the left hand side of your screen with just a single left side panel now the application launcher is at the very bottom which is of course whisker with your categories to the right and we'll go through the applications and the versions they're using in just a moment and then we have the power buttons up to the very top where we can log out restart shutdown switch user and suspend and we can also save sessions for future logins which i'm not a huge fan of so i'll always leave that disabled now something cool about the way their sort of panel has been set up so if we used to open up an application let's say our default file manager which is of course funer you can see that it's going to minimize into its own actual application icon and if we was to right click over that where you can see that we've got a few different options here so it's currently append to a dock so mx linux uses a dock kind of plug-in in your panel to give you that functionality as opposed to just pinning sort of launchers and then launching applications like so with their own separate sort of taskbar entry so if we close this off for now and in fact we also have the left super and right super automatically assigned to split applications to either side of the screen now one thing i don't quite like about the way they've set up foo now is that it's a single click to activate items so i'm just going to go straight into the preferences very quickly it's very easy to change go into behavior and i'm going to change it to double click to activate items which is more what i'm used to so it feels a bit more natural now let's right click on the panel and go straight into the panel preferences so of course we have the usual sort of stuff here the different layouts of mode so desk bar vertical horizontal now i wouldn't really worry about changing your layout too much in the panel preferences because we of course have mx's own tools and tweak tools to do that for you but what we are going to do is go straight into the items so we can see that what we are now using as our desktop panel plug-ins so like we said we've got the action buttons at the very top the date and time to follow it and then we have the doc-like taskbar which is allowing us to actually pin applications to our taskbar and then launch them from their own application icon so for example if we open up a terminal and then we go ahead and right click over that we can also just hover and then close it like so but with a right click we can now pin that to our taskbar and now for us to close that and we can just always just very nice and easily open it up once again without sort of expanding the amount of space that we are using on the panel so we just tie these things up a whole lot and i'm a massive fan of that implementation there are other ways of doing it of course there's things like doc bar x etc but i quite like the way mx have gone with that we then have our pulse audio plug-in status tray plug-in power menu plug-in the workspace switcher now it's set up sort of vertical not quite sort of horizontal which you should be quite used to on xfce so instead of using ctrl alt left and right to change workspaces it's going to be ctrl alt up and down so as you can see it's going up and down and that is your very small little workspace switcher right there and out of the box it's going to give you two but of course we can go straight into the work spaces oh wrong one we can go straight into the workspaces and then actually add a few more as well i'm someone who wants to have quite a static force let's go ahead and make that four and then as you can see we've now got a grid but it's still quite hard to see on here but it should now let us go left right and up and down so as you can see we're going left right and up and down so it's a whole sort of four-way grid there let's close that off brilliant so also on the desktop we have a couple of links here to the mx user manual and of course the faq so what i want to do now is spend a little bit of time going for the through the default applications and seeing what versions of things we are going to be using as it currently stands starting in accessories we of course have the application finder the archive manager catfish file search we have the conkey manager and the conkey toggle featherpad is our lightweight qt text editor we have calculator gtk hash idevice mounter and then we have the light dmg dk plus greater settings so we can change the way our sort of login screen looks and we'll check out the default look in just a moment we didn't have lucky backup the midnight commander which is a terminal based file manager that you can split into sort of two panes and then sort of use it like so very handy we have the mx updater which is what we're going to be using to update our applications etc and as you can see we get a nice little icon when updates are ready which is this bad boy right here and that will turn green where there are updates available to apply we have onboard and onboard settings which is for your onboard screen your on-screen keyboard task manager text info funeral and then xf burn now in development we have a genie and icon browser and in games we've got a couple of little simple games here so we have l breakout two majong a peg e i've not played that one before and swell foop and in graphics we have the document scanner we have g thumb to view our images and then we have a laze paint which i've never used before liberal office draw so we should have the full liberal office suite we'll go through that in just a moment and see what version we have so we've got no here so i'll probably go ahead and install just so i can use that to do simple image editing now in internet we have firefox and known ppp and your default desktop email client is going to be thunderbird which is a very capable email client and in for torrance we're going to be using the good old transmission now if we quickly open up firefox we can see what version we are using so let's go into help anabel and it should be a nice new version of version 90.0.2 then in multimedia we have the asla mixer the asunder cd ripper clementine which is a pretty decent application to manage and play your music library gmpt we have pulse audio volume control and then we have pretty much the best media player you could ask for in vlc xf burn once more and then we have a webcam void which is quite a cool little application for your webcam and is a bit more in depth in an application like cheese if we open this up there's a whole lot more you can do here so you have your screen there and then we have different effects sources and all of that good stuff so it's kind of like a shrunken down less sort of fully featured version of something like obs so something much better to use than just sort of your basic cheese or webcam viewer and i think ubuntu mate also now uses this as a default sort of webcam application so it's a very well known quite good application for your webcam so i think that's everything in multimedia now mx tools is something that we are going to go through because we're going to be checking out the mx tweak stuff and all of that good stuff in just a moment so we have the brightness tray we have the schrute rescue system the cli app based package manager a usb formatter again the idevice mounter job scheduler kernel updater for live usb mx boot options mx boot repair mx clean up mx codex installer mx conkey mx date and time mxfix gpg keys then we have a live usb maker so there's a whole lot of just mx applications we then have the mx remaster cc mx repo manager mx sound mx snapshot so again we can create a live iso snapshot of your running system which is very cool mx system events and then we have mx tools if we open up mx tools that's going to have pretty much that whole kind of list of applications that we've just run through in one nice easy to use window here and speaking with someone a little while ago they said this was kind of like the debut an alternative to yust yast from opensuse and i can kind of see where they're coming from and here we can also do the nvidia driver installer for those of you that use nvidia now if we go straight into tweak let's go ahead and show you how easy it is to change the sort of panel layout so effects first panel so currently we're displaying the panel on left but we can go ahead and click apply and it's super simple it's now going to move that to the bottom using the same kind of setup and now our workspaces are in a more kind of horizontal view and then as you can see we're no longer in a grid or using any vertical workspaces it's all going from left to right which i kind of prefer but we're going to leave it on the default layout at just the sort of left hand side for now cool now for theming we have quite a lot of different themes here that we can choose from which is very cool and they do include some of my favorite themes of all which of course are the whole arc dark variations we have arc arc darker arc dark arc lighter and then we have the blackbird and all of the matcha sort of theming there as well and then we also have a new mix and then for the window managers we also have again a nice selection of themes there so we have all of the arc stuff and then for icons not a bad selection we have the new mix and we have paparas mx blue as the default which i think is quite nice so i'm going to go ahead and leave it on there now for the compositor we can see that it's got the v blank set to auto and transparency and shadow options the compositor it's using is xfwm so the default xfce compositor then we can go into the display so we have gtk scaling here and we can also change the resolution of our screens and all of that good stuff we'll have config options so you know when you saw me do the sort of changing the behavior in the actual funar itself we can do it here as well so as you can see here we have enable single click infuno file manager which we have already disabled in the behavior but as a nice easy way to do it we can also do it all through the mx tweak tool which is very cool we can then do things like resetting our light dm to the system default enable mounting of internal drives by non-root users enable kernel sandbox use client-side decorations on gtk free applications that support them so that's csd and that was something that was brought in in xfce 4.16 and then we also have the option to use the tear free option for amd so this is something that i actually think is very cool and i think i often always have to do myself but they will go ahead and do that for you and just create the xorg.com with a tear free option so if you are experiencing any sort of screen tear that should go ahead and fix it for you which is very cool as well so let's close that off and then keep it moving what else have we got here so like i say a whole lot that you can really do here so a very cool little application with some in-house applications that makes using your system a lot easier especially when it comes to configuring it to your liking oh and then one more thing i forgot to mention is of course the password for administrative tasks set to user by default but we can easily switch over to root click apply and it will ask you for your password but i'm going to leave it on user now office wise we have a foliate which is an ebook viewer we then have the full liberal office suite pdf arranger and qpdf view let's go ahead and open up writer and see the version of writer we are currently using and if it's working with automatic spell checking out of the box it is indeed now if we go straight to help and about we can see that we are using liberal office version 7.0.4.2 and then we have the locale set to en gb which is all good okay i think that's pretty much everything that we need to check out in office we didn't have some settings here so a lot of this is going to be sort of your xfce settings and a few other additional things so of course we have the appearance packages so if you didn't want to use the mx tweak tool you could use the more sort of standard xfce packages so then go ahead and change your appearance and all of that good stuff anything else in here i might want to check out we have our bluetooth settings color profiles we have the very simple to use a firewall configuration which i'm sure we're all used to by now very simple little window there to let you sort of set the status to active change the profile and all of that good stuff is there anything else in settings worth us having a quick look at um no i don't think so and of course the default package manager we are going to be using to install new applications and just do a bit more in-depth package management is synaptics package manager now as far as other packaging formats i'm pretty sure there is no out of the box snap support on mx linux but i think there is flat pack support if we type in flat pack we can see that we do have the flat pack package installed so along with the flathead repository we could also go ahead and install our flat pack applications from flat hub which is very cool and i also think we have neo fetch installed out of the box which is a simple and handy way for us to see how much applications are installed by default however it doesn't appear to have the listed packages so i think what we'll do is we're going to go straight back into synaptic and see if we can get a list of what we how much packages we have installed out of the box before we make any changes to our system so we can see here under installed we have 1969 so just short of 2 000 so i think what we'll do now is we'll do a quick reboot and see how much ram we're using and then we'll start sort of setting up a few things and see how we go so we've just done a fresh reboot and run h top in the terminal which is installed out of the box and we can see there not too bad especially for a beta we're using under 700 mb at 613 and when you consider how much is set up for you out of the box and how many additional applications and tools you do have at your disposal that's not really too bad whatsoever now we can see just beneath that we have a swap partition of 8gb so using the sort of default erase disk and install it's gone ahead and created us a partition for our swap of eight and if we open up gparted which again is installed out of the box we can then also just see what other partitions it might have created for us so let that load in the volumes and then we're gonna go straight down to sdb and then we can see here we have quite a simple partition layout so we have our swap we have our root partition of ext4 and then we have our boot efi now there's a few other additional applications that i haven't shown that we don't really need to spend too much time going into but one that you might have saw come up when we just searched for g parted was the application called g debbie so whenever you download a dot dev application from the internet instead of sort of going into terminal doing sudo apt install dot slash and then followed by the package you can then just go ahead and use gw as a nice simple gui to install it for you now as well as the synaptic package manager they also have their own mx package installer and it has quite a few little lists here so we have popular applications sorted by category we then have the stable repo the test repo debian back ports and then what's really cool is we also have the flat pack here as well so mx linux includes this repository of flat packs for the user's convenience only and it is not responsible for the functionality of the individual flat packs themselves for more consult flat packs in the wiki so we can close that let's type in our password now it's going to download the package info and then as you can see it's already got the repo there for us which is of course flat hub and that's where we're going to go ahead and install a few applications needed to edit today's video and of course the main one being arcade and live so we can just select that and we can do like batch installs which is very cool so let's also go ahead and grab we'll get that as a flat pack why not and let's see if there is anything else that i might need no i think that'll be just enough for now so now all we need to do is just go ahead and press install and it's going to go ahead and install all of those applications that we sort of selected and we're good to go so i'll pause video here and come back once they're finished okay so our flat pack applications of and caden life have now been installed from the flat hub repository using mx's a very simple package installer now i tested out very quickly launching them and finding them in our whisker menu which it did without any issues at all and then i got a bit scared or worried that it wasn't going to work with the dock plug-in that we're using on our panel because it didn't originally find the icon for it or actually let us pin it fortunately i decided probably need to do a reboot and then it should work and i can confirm that if we now open up a flat pack application it does indeed find the correct icon and we can also right click and pin it to our dock and then we can launch our flat pack applications like we would any other native application straight from our taskbar without any issues now i think that's where i'm going to wrap it up with my first look of mx linux 21 so it's currently in its first beta phase once the final release is out we'll do a follow up where we'll go into a bit more depth and we'll include the other desktop versions so things like kde but i think it's quite safe to say that mx linux probably ships one of the nicest most user-friendly xfce desktop environments around and they do really put the user first to make it a whole lot easier especially for a new user coming over to set things up in a way that feels quite home and familiar to them thank you for watching if you've enjoyed this video please subscribe and if you've really enjoyed it you can consider supporting me on patreon join the discord there's a link in the description and i'll see you on the next one bye-bye

Channel: Tyler's Tech

Views: 20,628

Rating: 4.9395771 out of 5

Keywords: linux, mx linux, mx linux review, mx linux install, mx linux xfce, mx linux os, linux distro reviews, best linux, linux review, mx linux tools, fast linux, linux distro, mx linux conky, mx-21, mx linux xfce 4.16, mx linux 21, mx linux 21 review, best xfce desktop, best xfce distro, mx-linux 21, mx-linux 21 review, best debian based distro, mx linux review 21, mx linux debian, mx linux 21 xfce review, checking out mx-21, checking out mx linux 21, mx, mx 21, mx 21 linux

Id: 910kz3Fw86U

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021