An antiX newbie has a few issues.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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It’s NOT that antiX “isn’t good” for new computers, it’s that the hardware support and kernels available do not support ALL new computers. Newer computers that don’t introduce any new components, just faster processors may work fine; in my case, as I said, I got it to work, and I obviously love antiX, I just want to make sure that you are well informed.

Regarding MX Linux, they aren’t systemd fans either, but they aren’t quite as adamant against it as the antiX community is, and it’s possible to use packages that enable systemd on MX Linux.

What’s nice about free software is that there are a lot of options available. The Ubuntu project tree, more specifically Linux Mint, is where MATE was formed as an alternative to GNOME, and Cinnamon was also created by another effort. These are plausible, useful options, especially on recently purchased equipment.

Your wife may appreciate a Mint based system with a MATE environment. It sounds like you’re more the kind of person that appreciates antiX. Whatever you end up with, there is no shortage of stable, configurable choices. My best wishes to you in whatever best suits your needs.

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Brian Masinick

[Member Xunzi_23]

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Hi Waga,
Many of us regard the distro as a starting point for creating what is essentialy our own
distribution. fun and easy using the antiX included toolchain.

In case you feel like looking sometime there are huge numbers of themes, weather apps,
icon sets available. For themes https://www.box-look.org/browse/ is a goord starting point.
For conky and weather apps etc a bewildering number of flavours available on other sites.

Regarding newer hardware, some is problematic, working on one case yesterday, searching showed
other distros ran in to same issues, in case in question sound problem with HDMI and an obscure
architecture. Otherwise added newer debian kernel and antiX flies.

• This reply was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by Xunzi_23.

[Member Waga]

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Hello, I came back to kinda finish the story…
I tried one more thing to make mate work. I followed another guide, some that I found on this forum. It was extremely simple. I started with antiX core this time, so wifi was easy.
Then I used cli-aptiX and installed mate desktop.
That’s it.

But it wouldn’t work, just as the one I installed in a more laborious way.
At this point I gave up. FT10 was good enough and I didn’t want to spend more time on trying to make mate work.
I announced the decision to my wife….though I shared some of my disappointment as well. And she was like “I’m not in a hurry to get this machine…maybe you could work some more to make it as nice as that BSD?” She didn’t actually take a look at it even.
I
So…I went on to try something different. It came to my attention that Devuan actually supported runit. I tried to install it….and it just worked. No issues whatsoever.
But then I looked under the hood….and noticed that the runit implementation is skeletal. runit basically manages gettys. All other services are started SysV style. That was….disappointing. I kept it in my pool and took another try with void. Maybe I could compile these printer drivers?….I spent a full day on that. I actually failed at the compilation and making my manual build work, but finally I unpacked the .deb and copied its contents to the system…and the printer came to life.

Later I polished this installation. Also – in my first post I reported issues with initramfs-tools. Dracut, which is the void’s default, doesn’t have them.
And also void supports efibootmgr well, so after I update the kernel the EFI entry is updated automatically. I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

So I am leaving antiX. But despite some troubles I liked what I saw here. I liked the nice runit implementation (though I must admit I didn’t look really deep). I liked the lightweight desktop. I liked wttr.in.
I told before that wttr.in was not something my wife would enjoy….I was wrong, so I actually copied your weather solution (somewhat tweaked) to her system.

Thank you for the suggestions that I received from you.

Goodbye and farewell.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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@Waga: Sorry to see you go! With IceWM and the community member PPC’s work with FT10, that’s a pretty nice, light, efficient, good looking, and reasonably easy system, and it’s fast too.

IF that’s not enough, either for you or for your wife, MX Linux 21.3 is a pretty nice environment, and they offer Xfce and KDE desktops, and the Fluxbox window manager for “lighter” environments. The KDE edition automatically comes with “AHS”: Advanced Hardware Support for newer devices. They do have a separate AHS image for Xfce, plus their regular edition for middle aged systems. I recommend it as a great blend between simple and functional. It’s not as light as antiX is but it’s easy to install and they also have a good forum.

Best wishes in whatever you choose!

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Brian Masinick

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