My Lenovo G50 laptop is
back in business. After having its UEFI
gently bricked by whatever dodgy QA-less mechanism in any
which one distro that I’ve tested in the past year (but definitely NOT Ubuntu 17.10, it happened before),
installing a new kernel helped resolve the issue. So we’re testing distros on this machine once again,
and the first candidate is MX-17 Horizon.
Now, I have already tested the distribution on the old LG machine that I have, and found it to be an
excellent performer. Slick, fast, elegant, everything you need for fun and
productivity. But will it shine on the G50 box? Let’s check.
Into the horizon he rode
Or something. Maybe it’s the sunset. Never mind. MX-17 booted in the exact same fashion on the Lenovo
laptop as it did on the LG one – a million different font sizes and colors and types. Again, very fast. In
the live session, all the hardware was correctly initialized. Resource utilization was low and similar to
the RD510 machine, 440 MB RAM on idle and the CPU ticked just 1-2% max, with even more blazing fast results
than on the 2009 box.
The installation was also super quick – roughly four minutes to copy data, and then about two or three
minutes to setup GRUB. This is definitely better than what we had with
MX-16, where this step took half an ice age to complete. Now that the UEFI is
working properly, after reboot, I had the MX-17 menu, and the set of eight different operating systems all
nicely writ and displayed on the screen.
Ship ahoy!
The booted system had the same set of ailments as we’ve already seen. No Wireless, as this is the one
configuration that wasn’t properly ported from the live session. Also, the same annoying Bluetooth error
(even though I didn’t fiddle or do anything with it).
Day-to-day stuff, all there
Much like what we’ve already seen – and there were no supposedly hardware-dependent nonsense regressions
or bugs – you get smartphone support for all three major types, check, media support check, full network
support, check, a good arsenal of programs and robust package management, check. Consistent and pleasing
looks, check. Predictable and enjoyable user experience, check.
I customized the distro a little, installed extra software, even configured a panel shortcut for
Microsoft Office Online, because why not. After all, it’s an
essential program for pretty anyone who needs to write documents and share them with the world. The
performance of the site/app was phenomenal (through Firefox 57). Instant response, btw.
Other things
A delight all around. Very easy to configure and use, it’s all there. I still think
Plasma has some definite
ergonomic advantages over Xfce, but then, this desktop environment is making great strides forward, and it
has superior Samba and smartphone compatibility. Fonts are also really good in MX-17 Horizon. There are
some small visual glitches that need to be polished, but it’s nothing that makes you pout in anger.
Actually do people pout in anger?
Very nice fonts – and a new, better text editor:
The VLC icon is too big for the system area:
Resources & performance
Splendid. 420-440 MB of RAM on idle, the CPU ticking near zero. Everything opens instantly. Blink, and
you’ll miss it. And I mean fast blink, not a lazy chameleon waking up. This is by far the
most responsive system that I’ve tried in the past decade.
Hardware compatibility, stability, suspend & resume
100% on the hardware side, all the bits and pieces worked correctly. Suspend & resume, too, again
with lightning speed going to sleep and back again. There were no hangs, crashes or other errors apart from
the first boot niggles.
Battery life
Now, the interesting part. MX-15/16 scored the all-time high on this laptop for any Linux distribution,
clocking a very respectable 4.5 hours for the former, about 5.5 hours for the latter (with absolute zero
activity that is), and consistent 3.5-4 hours overall.
The battery capacity is about 75% now (has gone down in the last threeish years). Funny, because the LG
has almost all of its chemical energy eight years down the road. But that’s manufacturing quality and
whatnot for you. Anyway, whatever number we see indicates the theoretical limit is about 25-30% higher were
the battery new and fresh.
And so, with brightness set to about 50% and light desktop activity, the system area icon showed about 3
hours and change, which means a new one would give about 4 hours. This is slightly less than what MX-15
did, in line with the last release, and roughly 30-40% better than most other distros. Very cool, I have to
say.
Ready to party
Indeed, wunderbar:
41% of people did not notice I changed the desktop background.
Conclusion
Here we go. This is a short review by my standards, but I did carefully and thoroughly check every
single aspect of the desktop experience, in line with my normal testing, I just didn’t repeat myself.
Everything worked. There were no new problems other than the few small issues we’ve already seen. And on
the bright side, you do get the advantage of even better performance and responsiveness on the new
hardware.
While MX-17 Horizon will work perfectly well on ancient rigs, it still gains from new platforms, and
lets you take full advantage of its speed. Battery life is also very good. Overall, it’s a really top-notch
distro, and it didn’t botch or falter on two different machines. And as you recall, pretty much EVERY
distro that I’ve tested in the last two and a half years since I’ve purchased the Lenovo laptop has had
some issues, and then when I switched to the LG laptop, then they almost all started having problems there.
And it shows it’s not hardware that’s bad – it’s software. Good distros are far and few in between, and
MX-17 Horizon is truly a magnificent product. Way to go.
Cheers.