Systemd-Free MX Linux 21 Officially Released, Based on Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye”

MX Linux 21 Debian

The MX Linux team proudly announced today the release and general availability of MX Linux 21, a major release of their Debian-based, systemd-free and lightweight GNU/Linux distribution.

Dubbed “Wildflower”, MX Linux 21 has been in development for the past six months and comes as an upgrade to the MX Linux 19.x series, based on the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series, and shipping with the Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop environments, as well as, for the first time, an official edition featuring the Fluxbox 1.3.7 window manager with mx-fluxbox 3.0 configs.

The Xfce edition, which remains the flagship edition of MX Linux, introduces the Thunar Shares plugin for the Thunar file manager to access Samba shares, which you can access from a folder’s properties dialog, updated dock-like plugin, as well as various other updated Xfce packages.

The Fluxbox edition comes with a Fluxbox settings manager similar to Xfce’s settings manager, Tint2 as default panel with a collection of pre-built configurations and an expanded set of tools for panel management, tiling options using Ctrl + 1-9 or arrow keys, mxfb-quickshot and mxfb-timer, and revised Help docs with ten translations.

Highlights of MX Linux 21 include a new installer partition selection area with LVM support, new UEFI live system boot menus with “rollback” option and the ability to select boot options directly from the boot menu and submenus instead of using the previous console menus, and user password (sudo) for administration tasks by default.

This new MX Linux release also introduces a new app called MX Tour, which provides newcomers with a brief overview of each desktop environment. On top of that, users will find a new default theme for all three flavors called MX Comfort, a bunch of custom scripts in the Fluxbox edition, as well as numerous other small configuration changes, especially on the panel with new default panel plugins.

Hardware support has been improved as well, and MX Linux 21 is powered by the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series from Debian GNU/Linux 11, but a AHS (Advanced Hardware Support) ISO image featuring the Xfce desktop environment will be readied as well with the more recent Linux 5.14 kernel series.

These new kernel version bring better Realtek Wi-Fi support from Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) modules, which are installed by default, and better support for modern hardware. In addition, the Mesa Vulkan graphics drivers are installed by default in this release for a better gaming experience.

MX Linux 21 remains a systemd-free GNU/Linux distribution featuring SysVinit as default init system. However, systemd is available as well in this release as a boot option, but only on installed systems, not on the live ISO.

You can download MX Linux 21 right now using the direct download links below. Live ISO images are provided for 64-bit systems for the KDE Plasma flavor, as well as for both 64-bit and 32-bit systems for the Xfce and Fluxbox editions. Please note that the live ISOs won’t boot on systems with Secure Boot enabled.

Last updated 2 years ago

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