Two awesome Linux distros, both amazingly simple and graphical (point-and-click easy for us technically challenged users), both full-featured with amazing tools and plenty of support for both beginners and long-experienced users alike. Both come highly recommended and either one is a superb choice for general-purpose home and business computing. Any comparison between these two comes down to personal preferences, philosophical differences, and stuff like “looks and feel” rather than anything truly substantial.

For this post, I’m comparing Linux Mint’s Xfce edition with MX-Linux because they both use the same desktop environment. But both offer alternative desktop environments either in “official flavors” or in “community remixes” where users can play with other desktops. There are at least one zillion and twelve articles to explore on the many different Linux desktops there are to choose from, and my purpose is not to add to that clutter.

Linux Mint Xfce has been my daily driver for the past four months, just because. It’s easy to use and easy to share with others. Ready out of the box to just install and use right away. Over the months I have made changes to it – some because the default applications don’t suit me (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc – exchanged for Chromium, Evolution, etc) and a few that were necessary for technical reasons. Changing browsers and other common software is pretty much effortless in both distros and is usually a matter of mere preference, so I won’t delve into why I swap out Firefox and use Chromium, or Evolution instead of Thunderbird. Personal choice, easily changed in a few clicks of a mouse.

More important for my purposes here are the changes that I found necessary for technical and functional reasons. These have the potential to become “deal breakers” if I wasn’t able to make these changes, because they affect the function and reliability of the operating system.

The first necessary change was to limit systemd’s log size. Left alone it becomes a huge file and takes up abuncha storage space for no good reason. It’s limits should be set by default, for goodnessakes, and Linux Mint would do well to ship future releases with these limits already pre-set. Other logging software can be set up with reasonable limits as well. If you’re a Linux Mint user, click here for a super-easy guide to getting systemd under control, as well as keeping your Linux Mint installation clean and free of stuff that encumbers it and wants to slow it down.

Another absolutely necessary change – for me at least, after trying a dozen ways to get Timeshift to work as advertised, was to completely dump the misbehaving resource-hog entirely and replace it with a sweet, graphical alternative that not only does what Timeshift does, but also does what MX-Linux’s iso maker does – all in one much-easier-to-understand-and-use application called Systemback (find it for Linux Mint/Ubuntu here). Not only can you make snapshots of your system, but you can make it into a bootable iso and write it to a pen drive. Complete copy-and-install capability without using multiple apps and commands in a terminal. I suggest that Systemback would be a better default program for Linux Mint (and many other distros) than Timeshift is. For now it has to be added to Mint and any other Ubuntu-based OS via a PPA.

One clear advantage of MX-Linux on this front is the fact that it’s completely unnecessary in MX, which already has the coolest backup-and-restore and system-copy and make-an-iso-of-your-existing-OS software tools available. No need to add a PPA or anything. No replacement of a malfunctioning bohemoth app that many find frustrating with a whole ‘nother bit of software from a out-of-distto repository. Yes, MX-Linux uses Timeshift, but to make Timeshift do more than it does in Linux Mint, and do it better, it doesn’t need replacing.

As Ubuntu gets more and more “proprietary” and further removed from it’s Debian foundation, it tends to impose it’s ways on all of the distros that are built on it. That isn’t Ubuntu’s fault, of course, and many if not most Ubuntu-based distros disable those features like snaps-by-default that come down from Canonical On High, where Ubuntu is built and released. There are some things that Ubuntu indeed does better than Debian:

• Hardware support (Ubuntu’s enablement stack)
• Kernel Update Management (Debian still doing “backports”)
• Third-Party Repositories (most are Ubuntu-specific)

But those things come at the price of package-management troubles (snapd-vs-deb) and other annoyances with the potential to become deal-breakers. Debian, which MX-Linux is built from, is less vulnerable to these big proprietary changes. Because MX is Debian Stable, it simply doesn’t get more stable than MX. Stable means reliable, tested, proven, and dependable. Some folks will say “older, dated, out of style, maybe even obsolete.” That is a matter of opinion, of course. You may not find the latest version with the most bling and fanciest options in Debian Stable (look for them in Debian Sid or Debian Experimental), but for most home and business users, Stable is fitting.

If I had not been successful in taming Linux Mint Xfce to be what MX-Linux is basically by default, I would probably be using MX-Linux (and it’s ultralight, systemd-free sibling antiX on my old 32-bit bit machine) as my daily driver already. For now I am content to enjoy my “modified Mint” and it’s great community of contributors and fans.