Another Thing I Didn't Know About MX Linux

Technically, I began using Linux in 2002, with an ill-fated attempt to install Fedora on a PC -- not my daily driver -- just to see how I'd like it. I didn't. I don't know if I did something wrong in the installation or if that's just how Fedora came back then, but all I got was a command line and I wasn't going to move away from MacOS and Windoze unless I got a nice GUI interface.

As a practical matter, I began using Linux in 2003, when my Windoze computer got a boot sector virus that none of the usual tools could seem to destroy, and I had a couple of CDs a friend had sent me with Mandrake Linux on them. In an 18-hour period, I went from finishing my workday, to nuking my Windoze PC's hard drive, to installing and configuring Mandrake, to teaching myself enough to get by, to starting my next workday, with not a lot of sleep in between.

Since then, I've use a lot of different Linux distributions. A few that I can remember, after Mandrake, in no particular order: Debian, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Puppy, openSUSE, Slackware, Arch, Manjaro, Knoppix, Raspberry Pi OS, and Mint. I've used some of the previous ones in different versions, GUI setups, etc., and those are not nearly all of them. I've probably at least live-USB-previewed 50 or 60 distros.

And until I went looking for non-systemd distributions, I don't ever recall even hearing of MX.

So I found this headline on my "new tab" page a few minutes ago quite interesting:

3 reasons why MX Linux is more popular than Ubuntu, Fedora, and Zorin OS

I'm not sure the headline is really 100% truthful.

Distrowatch's "Page Hit" rankings have MX third behind CachyOS (which I've never used and barely heard of) and Mint, which indicates a lot of interest, but not necessarily more interest than many distributions that people get other than by visiting the distros' own web sites. It's worth noting, however, that that home page popularity long pre-dates the systemd controversy. Clearly, a bunch of people have been interested in MX Linux for quite some times.

And ranked on the basis of ratings by DistroWatch readers, MX comes in 26th of 34 distributions and behind two of the three in the headline (Ubuntu comes in 31st).

So I wouldn't put it in the "more popular than" league, necessarily. A lot of people get their Linux pre-installed on new machines (especially Ubuntu), or buy one of those "flash drive with 17 Linux distributions" things on Amazon, or get a USB from a friend, or whatever.

Also, the "three reasons" are kinda BS. There are all kinds of Linux distros that work great on all, or under-powered, hardware, that are easy to install/configure/update/maintain/use, and that fit offer "persistent live booting" if you want to run them from USB.

MX is, however, a bigger player than I assumed it was. And it deserves to be. It's a solid Linux distro.