Tux Machines

Kevin Boone: Gentoo vs. MX Linux on old-ish laptops

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 06, 2024

In this article, I’ll report my experiences with MX Linux, particularly how it stacks up alongside Gentoo. Now, it’s true that this is hardly a like-for-like comparison: Gentoo isn’t really a Linux distribution in the way that, say, Fedora and Ubuntu are. It’s more a collection of tools for building a Linux installation according to certain rules. Historically, Gentoo users have compiled most of their software from source, although recently there have been moves towards a measure of pre-compiled binary provision. Nevertheless, my criterion for comparison is simply this: how easy do these competing Linux variants make it, to keep old laptops alive and useful? So the comparison seems fair to me.

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