MX Linux 23.6 is here, taking the baseline of Debian 12.10 and adding some selected tweaks and updates of its own.
MX Linux 23.6 appeared earlier this week. MX is based on Debian, and this version is built on the basis of Debian 12.10, which came out in mid-March. Point releases of Debian 12 don't contain new features, so the changelog for 12.10 doesn't make for exciting reading.
MX Linux defaults to the latest Xfce – an excellent choice, in our opinion – click to enlarge
The MX Linux project builds on top of Debian, though, and sometimes makes more radical changes than its cautious and slow-moving parent. It already contains a newer version of Xfce than you'll find in Debian 12. As we described back in January when the previous point releases appeared, MX already has the latest Xfce.
Like Debian 12, this release is still based on the long-term supported kernel 6.1. Now you get kernel 6.1.133. If you have a very new PC and need its "Advanced Hardware Support," then the special AHS edition of MX 23.6 now has the latest Linux kernel 6.14. It sources its AHS kernel from the Liquorix kernel project. As we described when we looked at Liquorix a few years ago, if you want a cutting-edge kernel release on a Debian-family distro, you can easily install this yourself on Debian or Ubuntu, and equivalents are available for the Fedora and Arch families.
The current MX Linux ships with KDE Plasma 5.27.5, a version from May 2023 that's now long obsolete – click to enlarge
Alongside the special AHS variant, as usual, there are seven different flavors of MX Linux available: the default 64-bit x86 version, which like all versions defaults to Xfce but also offers KDE and Fluxbox editions. The two lighter-weight environments, Xfceand Fluxbox, also have an 32-bit x86 variant on offer. There's alsoa Raspberry Pi edition. Slightly to our surprise, the KDE edition comes with the elderly Plasma 5.27.5.
If you're already running MX Linux, then just update as normal. We also tried a clean install on our testbed ThinkPad W520, which has an Nvidia Quadro 1000M. The results were mixed. This version of MX claims to fix several bugs around Nvidia driver handling, but although it uses an old enough kernel version that Nvidia legacy drivers should work, they didn't for us. When we tried the built-in MX Nvidia driver installer, the tool correctly identified the GPU as a GF108GLM and installed the appropriate legacy driver – but this didn't work and our external DisplayPort monitor remained stubbornly blank. We suspect this is because Debian 12 no longer supports the older Nvidia legacy driver versions (340 or 390) that our ThinkPad needs.
If you skip formatting the root partition, it tries to keep something that may not be there. Whoops – click to enlarge
The MX Linux installer is a sophisticated and not very beginner-friendly app that the distro shares with its cousin, antiX Linux, which we reviewed in 2023. This has its own homegrown partition-selection system, and this doesn't play very nicely in multi-boot scenarios. Selecting an existing partition defaults to formatting it – even if that volume has something in it already. We had to specifically override this and tell it to preserve the existing contents of our /home and even UEFI system partitions. That's a critical failing.
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Worse was that we couldn't choose not to format the empty Linux partition that was there waiting. Choosing "preserve contents" on the partition to be used for the OS also tries to preserve the contents of the /home directory – but that didn't work. It was a new partition, so there wasn't one. Our test machine has a separate /home partition on another drive anyway. The installer tries to preserve a directory that isn't there, which understandably fails, obliging us to format it again. We then hit another problem. The installer also wanted to format the virtual disk devices created by the Ventoy multi-boot tool.
Setting the locale and keyboard to UK English, which you have to do in at least four different places – click to enlarge
Since we want to keep our Ventoy key, we grabbed a spare USB key and wrote the ISO directly to it, which was fine – though it's disappointing as MX Linux worked with Ventoy before. Using a dedicated installation thumbdrive, everything else worked fine, including sound and Wi-Fi – except our second screen. In fairness, the DisplayPort output didn't work in the previous MX Linux release either – but it works fine in most other distros, even some with much newer kernels, such as Ubuntu and Elementary OS.
Niggles aside, we like MX Linux. Experienced Debian folks wishing to avoid systemd may be happy with Devuan, but newbies will find it forbidding and fiddly. MX Linux avoids systemd while still being considerably more polished than Debian, let alone Devuan. It also comes with much better system management tools – indeed, it also beats anything in the Ubuntu family on this front, including Linux Mint. ®
