I have used MX on desktop PC’s with no issues. However, I recently installed MX on a HD that I had connected to an old HP desktop (circa 2007). It worked fine there. I then pulled the HD and inserted it into a Dell laptop circa 2012. On the Dell laptop I can not get the GUI to run. I have to run it from the CLI only. The HD actually has Ubuntu 2018 on it and it runs fine in both machines. Looking for possible reasons as to why this has happened. I suspect it may be a video card issue but not sure. Both machines have 6 GB of ram and intel 2 cpu’s. Are there CLI commands that will resolve this type of problem.
Yes, probably, but it’s hard to answer this type of question, in general. The reason why Ubuntu works is because it does a lot of things well out of the box, which is one of the major + points about Ubuntu. Recently, I had a similar situation like you. Then I gave up, installed Kubuntu and everything worked like a charm. Even though I am an avid Debian user, I have to give these thankful credits to Ubuntu, all the way.
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I agree and I know I could use Kubuntu or puppy and have used peppermint, but happen to like how MX runs on small laptops plus trying to get some friends to consider switching from windows to Linux and MX is real simple so thought I could put it on their laptops as a dual boot. Thanks for your comments
Bob
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Since you can access the CLI, maybe you could try installing a desktop environment?
sudo apt install --reinstall xfce
or install another desktop environment like:
sudo apt install mate
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have you tried running startx?
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yes tried startx but doesn’t work
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I noticed in the boot process for the laptop that it indicates Plymouth has failed. The desktop does not have that problem so I am going to download a tarball of plymouth and install when MX is running on the laptop…Won’t get to that until thursday though
Bob
if you are still interested in troubleshooting, i was wondering if you had looked at system logs. if you are running mx without systemd, i think that means you don’t have access to journalctl which has some handy boot log display options. i think you can still check dmesg -H ( with --level=err or --level=warn can help focus a search) as well as cat /var/log/syslog. i like lnav and it worked on antiX so i think it should also with mx.
You could really to install other environment ( mate, cinnamon, xfce ) as already
suggest by Abhishek, this seems to be the best solution than stay searching the guilty. 
I did try installing mate, cinnamon and XFCE per Abhisheks direction but it does not have any affect on the laptop. However, when I place the HD into a desktop all three are available.
When you typed startx, did you get some error message?
(Could you share it with us?)
Did you have some proprietary graphics driver installed on the old laptop?
If yes, you may want to reinstall xserver-xorg-video-all package.
I’m not sure if this helps, but I would try it.
Whwn I tyoe startx i only get a blank screen with no error msgs. Since the laptop was not mine I don’t know about proprietary graphics drivers. However I know the person that had the laptop before and they are not technical enough to know how to update drivers or anything like that. When I got the PC I put a new SSD HD in that I had formatted and installed MX on it while it was in a desktop. I will look at the drivers and see if that is possible and also install the xserver app.
Bob
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If you can boot into the root CLI then you might run these two commands " lspci -vnn | grep VGA -A 12 " " glxinfo | grep OpenGL " to check grapics driver and " cat /etc/X11/default-display-manager " to check display manager. I ran these commands using Linux Mint but they should work for MX Linux.
If you installed MX Linux while in a desktop then you may have
driver issues after moving SSD to the laptop. Was both PC’s 32bit or 64bit?
another direction instead of troubleshooting the present mx install would be to try a separate mx install (a triple boot in a sense) on the same drive (or maybe even start with a live usb?) to see if it has better functionality.
The live boot is a great idea on the laptop. I will try that and see what happens. Also going to try your other suggestions
Bob
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The command “startx” worked for me. Thanks from the future.