I’ve been curious about antiX ever since I installed MX Linux on my laptop. MX Linux says it’s a “collaborative effort between antiX and MX” – it seems like a slightly heavier version of antiX, using XFCE instead of IceWM for the desktop, but otherwise leaning towards lower resource use.
The one thing keeping me from checking out antiX is that I’ve just been liking MX Linux so much, it stopped me from distro hopping, and I just don’t want to start again, haha.
MX Linux is my go-to for a modern-feeling system on older hardware (runs great on 15+ years old PCs, I installed it on a ThinkPad T22 a while ago and it ran fine). And XFCE is customizable enough that you can set it up so it feels familiar to either Windows or Mac users.
I use Cinnamon on my daily driver, but XFCE is my fallback for most other things. And I like a lot of the utilities that come with it (Thunar just feels right to me for some reason).
Unfortunately, I don’t have great insight on those two, since I keep my laptop setup pretty simple.
I don’t really mess with the init system very much, so I can’t really weigh in on that. I’ve probably only run “sudo service start <thing>” a few times, so aside from the CLI being a little different from systemd, I haven’t noticed a difference. There would probably be another learning curve if you’re looking to actually create system services, but I never end up doing that on my laptop.
I haven’t had any issues with the packages, but that’s probably because I use the Flatpak if it’s available. So yes, the debian repo wouldn’t be current, but all of the daily things I use (browser, Thunderbird, Steam, text editor) get updates from the Flathub repo. The built-in MX package manager has a section for Flathub, so you don’t have to add anything for that.
I’ve been curious about antiX ever since I installed MX Linux on my laptop. MX Linux says it’s a “collaborative effort between antiX and MX” – it seems like a slightly heavier version of antiX, using XFCE instead of IceWM for the desktop, but otherwise leaning towards lower resource use.
The one thing keeping me from checking out antiX is that I’ve just been liking MX Linux so much, it stopped me from distro hopping, and I just don’t want to start again, haha.
MX Linux is my go-to for a modern-feeling system on older hardware (runs great on 15+ years old PCs, I installed it on a ThinkPad T22 a while ago and it ran fine). And XFCE is customizable enough that you can set it up so it feels familiar to either Windows or Mac users.
Yeah, I think XFCE is my new favorite desktop environment, regardless of which distribution I use in the future.
I use Cinnamon on my daily driver, but XFCE is my fallback for most other things. And I like a lot of the utilities that come with it (Thunar just feels right to me for some reason).
I was looking at this a while back, but was hesitant because I just got the hang of systemd.
The WM/DE don’t really matter much to me, I tweak to my liking one way or another.
A few questions if you don’t mind:
How do you find it when needing to interact with the system? Is it sysyemd-like or is there another learning curve ahead?
What are the repos / installers like? Being debian, I assume it’s not always current? How do foreign repos fare?
Unfortunately, I don’t have great insight on those two, since I keep my laptop setup pretty simple.
I don’t really mess with the init system very much, so I can’t really weigh in on that. I’ve probably only run “sudo service start <thing>” a few times, so aside from the CLI being a little different from systemd, I haven’t noticed a difference. There would probably be another learning curve if you’re looking to actually create system services, but I never end up doing that on my laptop.
I haven’t had any issues with the packages, but that’s probably because I use the Flatpak if it’s available. So yes, the debian repo wouldn’t be current, but all of the daily things I use (browser, Thunderbird, Steam, text editor) get updates from the Flathub repo. The built-in MX package manager has a section for Flathub, so you don’t have to add anything for that.