Every distro should steal these 3 easy setup features from MX Linux

Published Sep 24, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT Arol is a tech journalist who currently works as a contributor at How-To Geek since 2022. He first began writing online for the short-lived portal of Spanish-language gaming forum Emudesc in 2013. Years later, in 2017, he got his true start in tech journalism working for a small Google-focused site called Pixel Spot. He transitioned to a news and feature writer role at XDA Developers that same year, where he worked until 2021 before making the jump to other websites. Arol brings nearly a decade of writing experience, and the occasional hot take, to his writings. While he's a technology lover at heart, he holds computer hardware and smartphones particularly close to heart. You'll normally find him covering news, although he has also written the occasional deal, buyer's guide, how-to post, and round-up. He's also written for Android Police and MakeUseOf. He's also a Political Science student. When he's not writing, you'll probably find him hitting the gym, trying to ace a new hobby, reading his textbooks, or traveling. You can reach him at me@arolwright.com. MX Linux is one of the most popular distros, and while its Debian base is attractive, it's not even its biggest draw. The bigger draw is MX Tools, a suite of in-house utilities that turn tedious jobs into a few clicks. Three of them, specifically, are stuff I'd love to see more often in other distros. MX Snapshot Turn your running system into a bootable ISO Most Linux distributions treat backups and custom spins as two separate problems, and both usually involve a trip to the terminal. MX Snapshot handles both in a single graphical tool that turns the system you are currently running into a bootable ISO image. Everything you have installed, configured, and tweaked gets packaged into a live system that you can write to a USB drive, boot on another machine, and install from, since the MX installer comes along with it. The tool offers two modes for very different needs. The first preserves user accounts and personal data, making the resulting ISO a portable copy of your setup that can serve as a recovery disk or a way to move to new hardware. The second resets accounts and strips personal information, producing a clean image you can hand to friends, deploy on a bunch of computers, or share as your own respin. Before building, you can exclude common folders such as Downloads, Music, or Videos to keep the image lean, pick a compression method that trades build speed against file size, and have checksums generated automatically. Building a custom live image on most distributions means learning tools like live-build or archiso, writing configuration files, and assembling the system from scratch. MX Snapshot works from the installation you already use, so the image reflects exactly what you have. The project keeps refining it, too. In MX 25.2, MX Snapshot can generate microcode-enabled live systems when you install the optional uc-tool-mx package. Pairing it with MX Live USB Maker closes the loop, letting you write the finished ISO to a drive without leaving the MX Tools dashboard. A deal that's hard to miss, if you ask me. MX Package Installer One window for every software source Software installation is where many beginner-friendly distros stumble, not because apps are missing, but because they are scattered across sources. A Debian-based system might pull packages from the stable repository, backports, a vendor's own repository, and Flathub, each with its own quirks. MX Package Installer puts those sources in one window, organized into tabs, so you can see where software comes from before you commit. The Popular Applications tab is the standout here. Rather than dumping thousands of packages on the screen, it offers a curated list grouped by category, covering browsers, office suites, media tools, and other commonly requested software. Many entries install applications that aren't in Debian's repositories, handling repository setup and signing keys behind the scenes. That removes the most error-prone step of third-party installs, the one where a command copied from a forum leaves the system with a broken sources list. The list keeps growing as well. With MX-25.3, the Popular Apps section began offering Siduction 7.x kernels, and several third-party VPN installation options were updated. The remaining tabs expose the MX repositories, the MX test repository, Debian backports, and Flatpak, which the tool can configure for Flathub. Each view shows what's already installed and what can be upgraded, and removing an app is as simple as selecting it and clicking uninstall. Backports, specifically, is particularly useful, since it gives users of a conservative Debian base newer versions of specific apps without upgrading the whole system or adding untrusted sources. Other distros offer app stores, and GNOME Software and KDE Discover are polished in their own ways. What they rarely do is make the provenance of a package this explicit or bundle vetted installers for popular software that lives outside the official repositories, making MX Package Installer a pretty decent offering all in all. MX Boot Taming GRUB without touching a config file Bootloader problems are among the most intimidating issues a Linux user can face, largely because, as you can probably guess by the name of the software component affected, they strike before the desktop even loads. MX Linux addresses this with a pair of tools, MX Boot Options and MX Boot Repair, that make GRUB approachable for people who have never opened its configuration file. MX Boot Options handles everyday customization. From one window, you can change how long the boot menu waits before starting the default entry, pick which entry boots by default, or have the system remember the last choice, which is handy on dual-boot machines. It can enable or disable a graphical splash screen, set a background image for the menu, and add kernel parameters without hand-editing /etc/default/grub and remembering to regenerate the configuration afterward. The tool has also grown over time, and MX's feature list shows that Boot Options now includes installing GRUB themes. MX Boot Repair is the emergency counterpart. When a Windows update overwrites the bootloader or a partitioning change leaves the system unbootable, the usual fix is to boot a live USB, mount partitions, chroot in, and reinstall GRUB by hand. Boot Repair wraps that process in a guided interface that can reinstall GRUB to the master boot record, an EFI system partition, or a root partition, regenerate the GRUB menu, and back up or restore the boot sector. Because MX live images ship with the full MX Tools suite, you can run the repair from the same USB drive you used to install the system. Ubuntu users may be familiar with the third-party Boot-Repair utility, but it has to be added from a PPA, and few distros include anything comparable out of the box. openSUSE's YaST is a notable exception, yet most distros still leave GRUB tweaks and recovery to the command line, which is exactly where newcomers are least comfortable. Another win for MX Linux there. Small MX tools that fix big Linux headaches MX Snapshot, MX Package Installer, and the MX Boot tools solve problems every Linux user eventually faces, from backups to broken bootloaders. None of them are flashy, but together they make MX remarkably forgiving. I'd love to see stuff like this in other distros.