The community's stated goal is to produce "a family of operating systems that are designed to combine elegant and efficient desktops with high stability and solid performance".

MX Linux uses Xfce as the main desktop environment, to which it adds a free-standing KDE Plasma version and, in 2021, a stand-alone Fluxbox implementation.

MX Linux began in a discussion about future options among members of the MEPIS community in December 2013.

[40] The "cloned" image is bootable from a disk or USB flash drive, maintaining all settings, allowing an installation to be completely backed up, and/or distributed with minimal administrative effort, since an advanced method of copying the file system developed by antiX Linux uses bind-mounts to perform the "heavy lifting".

Some community members exchanging posts at MX Forum and distribute their custom respins.