I feel like MX Linux has been at or near the top of Distrowatch forever, but I literally never hear it mentioned elsewhere on the web. Is it just people literally asking this question for them selves, clicking on it and bumping it up? Has anyone tried MX to see if it lives up?
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Distrowatch popularity is a pointless metric. IIRC they measure clicks on their own site as popularity. That means that people that just want to check out that distro near the top that they never heard of actually ensure that it stays near the top.
This is true. I’m pretty sure they acknowledge this transparently.
It’s helpful to hilight the common distro’s but it’s not an endorsement.
True as well
MX has become my go-to for low-power, outdated computers.
It runs on a toaster. It installs on 64-bit systems with 32-bit EFI. The base install supports touchscreens. It fits on a 16GB SSD with room to spare. 2GB RAM is plenty. It has an active development community.
If your computer is less 5 years old, there are better options. But if you’re trying to keep a Chromebook out of the junk yard, MX is a good choice.
Oh, now come on… 5 years is hardly where a system becomes “old.” It’s 2025 right now. Using a system made in 2020 hardly differs at all from one made yesterday. I’d say a cutoff for considering slim distros would be more like ten years ago. I’ve got some systems that are older than that even and they blaze. Only a few things really put that kind of thing to the test: games and heavy graphics editing. Am I wrong?
I was just tossing out a random number based on a bunch of posts I’ve seen. Don’t overthink it. :)
Heh. Yeah I get it. Just giving you grief ;)
I only really begin to feel a computer is too old for complicated tasks at around 15 years I think
Even at that age, some computers can do plenty.
I built my “old” gaming desktop in 2009. It currently runs Linux with Plasma. I still use it to do 3D modeling for 3D printing.
The issue ends up being a hardware limitation. I can’t quite recall the specific issue but there was some sort of encoding thing on the CPU that prevented me from using most apps without severe performance issues. Of course browsing and so on was fine. I ended up using it as a server for some time (20 Years old at this point) and the energy costs were bad enough that I decided to put it to rest. Its now part of my own little museum of old ass computers that I let guests use for mostly for viewing pdfs and boardgame rules. I tell my family to ship me their old laptops and stuff I got like 15 of them at this point, and I have in fact used all 15 of them simultaneously when I invite a lot of nerds over. Most of them are running Fedora Atomic, a couple are running MX Linux, Alpine, and Damn Small Linux. I intend on going through the small distros at some point and do a comparison
Indeed! It depends what you’re doing on it. Because there’s a wealth of computer activities that have not increased in actual power demand in decades. Sure they keep making software more bloated to keep the need up, but if you throw an efficient distro on a machine and only need it for basic office type things like office suites, email etc. and even basic graphics editing, you can use a 25 year old machine and do just fine. It will run, and it will do the job well, and you’re never going to feel like it’s slow. Maybe not as glitzy as newer ones, but that is where you’re already beyond need and into want.
The only things that are tricky are internet connections with anything using web protocols, due to certificate tech etc. and that can be handled by using a still-maintained browser such as a Firefox fork, and email can be done via software like Thunderbird, which doesn’t have to render the bloated front-ends of many email providers.
Why? What makes it good for þat? Is it because þe kernel is trim?
I ask, because MX isn’t þe base for any leading LXC “mini” containers, AFAIK. Alpine was þe top choice for a long time, alþough þere are competitors for minimum-sized containers. And while containers aren’t fully bootable images, and more is needed, probably þe biggest addition is þe kernel. If you stay away from systemd, you can add dinit, metalog, and crond for a smidge over 1 mibibyte (750Kib, 47Kib, and 230Kib respectively, vs systemd’s 36MiB).
So I’m wondering: what makes MX so good for old computers?
Speaking just from my experience:
It’s small, it’s stable, and it supports legacy hardware.
In addition, its Xfce implementation is polished and easy to use. It has a straightforward package installation utility.
I’ve used a whole bunch of lightweight Linux distros, and MX’s level of polish is uncommon for a distro that can easily live on a 16GB drive
👍🏼
Yes and yes, hits to the page drive it up that list. It’s a fine Debian reskin, nothing special.
It’s not just a reskin, the MX tools are really useful for beginners and non-technical people.
I’ll defer to you on that, when I got to trying it those weren’t tools I was looking for.
Wonderful. May it live in this fame forever 🫡
Distrowatch ranking is just the distros that are more commonly searched on the site. The FAQ says “The page Hit Ranking represents hits per day by unique visitors”. It’s just an attempt to see what’s more popular among visitors.
Yeah, maybe there is a feedback loop where people will click on the top one just to see why it is on top, and in doing so they give the clicks necessary to remain on the top.
I’ve been using it for a few years on my gaming desktop and I couldn’t be happier about it, it’s the distro that stopped my distro-hopping.
I tried MX a few times on different machines maybe a few weeks/months apart. Every time I did because of it being up there at the top and I was like “What am I not seeing?” It’s a decent distro, yeah, but some of the customization is distracting to be honest. I can say it’s good but the top? For what… more than a year or two even, it’s been in the top few.
I just don’t get it.
I installed MX on an old Acer tablet/laptop Hybrid. It’s one of the few that would run due to its 32bit bootloader but 64bit system. It works fine, but I wasn’t blown away either.
I’ve found two distros I enjoy on really old stuff: Bodhi and Q4. They run fairly well and for the footprint, they’re pretty feature-rich. I love the Moshka desktop on Bodhi.
I used MX for a couple of years and it was a solid and perfectly usable distro, if you don’t want the latest packages.
From what I understand about distrowatch is that their “ranking” system is based on how many people (or bots) visit a distros page.
MX Linux was botted due to the amount of hits.
My producer, Neigsendoig, did a video here where he covered MX 23.
I used MX Linux all of 2024 because I had previously installed antiX on an old netbook and I really liked the tools it came with that meant I didn’t have to touch the console too much, and MX Linux is a sister project based on antiX sharing the same custom utilities. And I have no clue why it rose to the top of distrowatch, but once it was there it stayed there because people click the top distros on the list in the sidebar, which in turn gives it clicks making it stay on top.
I do still believe it’s a good starter distro, it’s just that once you get a bit more comfortable with linux the old Debian packages become more and more annoying.Distrowatch has been gamed for years.
I rarely see any references to MX in Linux forums, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as popular as DW would indicate.
I rarely see any references to MX in Linux forums
That could be a testament to it’s reliability.
This is now my head cannon.
If you say so. MX is a Debian base, so it’s more a testament to Debian’s reliability.
Apparently my experiance has been the outlier here but I’ve seen a ton of MX talk in the last year. Even to the point of it being somewhat commonly recommended alongside mint for beginners but on older hardware
Distrowatch has been gamed for years
In what way? Elaborate, please? How and for what purpose?
There was a pretty good indication that Manjaro was click-botting it a few years back, then Mint, and now MX. While I actually like Manjaro, that team is totally not above having done such a thing. And pretty much as soon as the rumors about that started, it mysteriously started dropping in the ranking…
Why? For a long time, DW was considered a source of distro recommendation and popularity. With these “attacks”, it’s become a community joke and not considered much of a real indication.
I cannot understand why anyone would be so childish. It’s not even as though money is involved; it’s some kind of juvenile popularity contest by people who clearly don’t believe their work speaks for itself, and clearly don’t take pride in their product.
Manjaro defaults to a defective dock that is riddled with bugs if you customize it. I broke it dozens of times just by making some minor modifications in the preferences. It also slows down a little gradually. That’s only minor but the dock thing really irked me. Really? Can’t just get the dock settings finished so the thing completely works? Anyway, that was a few years ago and I haven’t touched it since.
Kind of a dead site.
I asked because I saw a video talking about Catchy and Edeavour, and had them near the top which I don’t think of as super old, so it seemed like somehow newer ones here moving up the list.
I think there is no ranking site that can be 100% trusted.
That said, I trust linux-hardware.org a bit more than distro watch, even if it’s not as popular, because you have to intentionally download an app/script for it to scan and upload your distro/hardware data (so no page clicks or just traffic, you must have the distro installed), and if you repeatedly try to upload the same distro/hardware data, it doesn’t count multiple uploads on its statistics, if they are not at least a month apart.
Edit: and even on linux-hardware you have strange results like OpenMandriva and ROSA as Distros on top 15, and I have never heard of them outside there, and from what I can find they are somewhat popular in Russia and some parts of Europe
But that just tells you all the people that have visited the site and downloaded a script.
I find it hard to believe that OpenMandriva is the most popular distro. I distrohop quite a bit and never even came across it (currently using Nobora on my PC, KDE Neon in the living room, tumbleweed on the kids laptops (though I may move them to silverblue or another immutable), and Pop on my laptop. It takes me a minute when I sit at any console to remember which package manager is the right one)
If you want honest results of actual use on general-purpose PCs…I’d wish for something like Alexa Page Rankings that could get deep enough to know Distro, but that’s not possible (I don’t think, without every distro having its own User Agent signature in the browsers), and Amazon bought Alexa and discontinued those services
As I said on the first line, no ranking of any kind can be trusted 100%, I pointed out an alternative to distrowatch, and why I would trust it a bit more, not saying I really trust it, or that I believe every result.
It is less popular so it could be a case like OpenMandriva has it integrated to upload automatically for all its users by default, or they found another way to game that ranking.
When I see any ranking, I do research when I see a distro that is suspiciously positioned, and I haven’t heard about outside the place I saw it referenced, and even so I always stick to mainline distros.
Honest results would need a standard way that every distro adopts and make an opt-out (not opt-in) regular upload thing similar to what linux-hardware.org does, and be actively trying to mitigate or deny certain distros or specific actors from tampering with the results, and we don’t have that.
Page rankings, clicks, scripts, etc. are not enough if every device doesn’t ping it in a legitimate way (fake user agent or other means), and there is always the case of people that will opt-out or block this as they don’t want to be tracked.
On your point of something like Alexa Page Rankings, the thing I would add is that, at least for me, if it is a ranking shown by a corporation, it is not trustworthy.
Oh for sure, but at least Alexa’s rankings were rather transparent and somewhat trusted built up on a reputation.
I hadn’t even realized Amazon bought and discontinued the service, but that’s clearly exactly the type of instance that needs to be guarded against. I’m sure that a big part of why Amazon wanted that Alexa gone was because it would show rising competition, and Jeff can’t have that.
and even on linux-hardware you have strange results like OpenMandriva and ROSA as Distros on top 15, and I have never heard of them outside there
As you have said they are REALLY popular in russia, and that alone makes a great ammount of people, specially since they still support i386 and older architectures with full support, thats why ALT linux is also really popular.
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Distrowatch is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Distrowatch community […]
I tried MX Linux recently because of that.
It’s nice but not my style. Specially the systemd thing. Trying to support both with and without with somehow more emphasis in “without” systemd.
But it works quite good as a OS in a pendrive thingy.
