I consider this to be one of the best if not the best out of Debian based distros. Make yourself a favour, get an usb enclosure for mSATA and an SSD (basically a big usb stick) and put MX on it - you won't regret it. It's crazy good as a portable usb stick distro. Dolphin made some tutorials on doing a persistent install https://www.youtube.com/user/runwiththedolphin/videos

By any chance have you tried Linux Mint? I find it well polished and useful, in that the environment just works and gets out of my way. It helps right where I need things to be done for me (like looking for proprietary drivers and extensions, or just the right set of config choices in the System Settings applet), and otherwise steps aside to let me focus on my work.

Been using it since 2016, and I'm now in the verge of upgrading to the latest, but I would be open to other Debian or Ubuntu derivatives, if they bring an even better experience than Mint.

Opinions?

On a tangent, I find the straight-up Debian Stable pretty polished. On the surface of it, feels exactly like Ubuntu, which makes me wonder why would anyone choose a derivative, especially given that anyone can easily configure it to their heart’s content.

the release cycle is the major point I suppose. Debian stable is very old for a workstation. Running testing or unstable is usually fine but not everyone might like it. With something like Ubuntu and two year/6 months update cycles you're probably closer to what most people want on a desktop.

> Debian stable is very old for a workstation.

For a programming workstation perhaps. Many people can do their work with the software provided with Debian Stable. If they're job isn't changing much, there's less to worry about over the life of install too.

Have you tried LMDE - Linux Mint Debian edition? It is faster than Linux Mint which is based on Ubuntu. That said, I do think MX is better optimised for performance than even LMDE and find it perceptively to be a tad bit faster.

How big of a delay are you okay with on your security patches?

Every hop from the top level distro adds.

I used Mint almost ten years ago, actually I feel It kinda lost it's relevance with Ubuntu MATE and Budgie as well as Pop OS being very user friendly.

Cinnamon is a 10/10. I urge you to try it out!

Cinnamon on Mint is indeed 10/10. I used to run it even on other distros but it never gets as polished anywhere else. That's the flagship feature of Mint if there is one to mention.

I use Debian testing with the Cinnamon desktop environment.

Mint "Debian Edition" used to be good. I gather they recently went over to the Dark Side, similar to Ubuntu.

What makes it so great?

Been eyeing MX for a long time but worried about how much different it is from Ubuntu. What is your tldr of it?

It seems better optimised and well balanced - uses less resource and offers better performance and thus is perceptibly faster than Ubuntu.

This appears to be a non-Systemd Debian, like Devuan, oriented to desktop use.

It does have systemd, but it's disabled by default, and instead used sysvinit. The wiki says fire versions 14-17, but the blog post basically saying that it would stay that way for 19

https://mxlinux.org/wiki/system/systemd/ https://mxlinux.org/blog/about-mx-19-and-systemd/

OK, then I do not understand any relevant difference between MX and Debian.

A few minutes' digging does not reveal an objective reason to pay attention to yet-another-Debian-fork. Anybody who wants adoption should have a good story about why it might be a better choice for the reader than, e.g., Debian, in an easily-found place.