- This topic has 1 reply, 1 voice, and was last updated Mar 31-3:53 pm by PPC.
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PPC
Some people wrongly got the idea that, because there are not that many posts on this thread, that antiX development stalled…
Technically, antiX is making great progress – version 21 (despite some annoyances with the Package Installer) seems great, and we even got a 19.5 version for those that don’t really want/can’t upgrade to a Debian 11 based system. We have 2 init systems available…
All that is really too technical for me- I’m more the kind of self tough person that tries to write or adapt scripts to offer GUI’s so us, common folks, can make stuff happen on our computers without having to be command line pros…
I’ve been busy developing ft10-transformation version 1.4 – for those that don’t know what this is- it’s a mix of scripts that installs and manages a tint2 toolbar and a jgmenu, customized to offer the same user experience and looks most people coming from Windows 10 or 11, Linux Mint, or even Android, expect – everything can be configured using simple GUI’s- and there are lots of some new tiny applications that antiX does not include by default that make antiX with ft10 installed about as feature rich as an android device (weather, news, calendar, alarm, stopwatch, timer, world clock, cloud access, easy access to network shared folder, a file manager customized to have the usual bookmarks, recent files and a Trash Can, etc).My suggestions:
1-One thing that ft10 includes that I think should be part of the default antiX is “Debinstaller” – it’s a simple GUI that allows users to install off-line .deb packages, without having to use the terminal. It works much like antiX Updater – it’s what I call a semi-gui application – users don’t usually have to interact with the terminal, but they still see what the terminal is doing- it’s a script that’s only some kb in size and has no dependencies that are not included out of the box in antiX Full.
This script (and it’s .desktop file and localization files) can be added to a future update of the antiX-goodies package- the work is already done – it just has to be packaged
2- Package Installer is great – almost the perfect mini app store – east to use -newbies can complain all they want it does not even show icons for the apps, it’s plain but it works (but for some reason it has problems installing many apps at a time, particularly if they are in different categories).
But users that want to install applications that are not in P.I. have to use another different GUI – the powerful Synaptic. Why not use just one application to install packages via P.I. AND from the Repository? Skidoo share here in the forum the link to MX’s Package Installer, that I’ve been running on antiX 19, 64 bits on my home desktop, for many months- it’s the default P.I. with 2 extra tabs – one tab to let users install stuff from the repository and another one to display the installation process – avoiding the need to display the terminal – once again, most of the hard work is already done – it can be used to replace/used as an alternative to the default P.I.
3- In recent years Linux has become a somewhat capable way to play commercial games – the antiX dev team saw that coming and added Steam to the Package Installer long ago. But there are 2 good alternatives to access commercial games – “Heroic games launcher” and “Lutris” – making them available on the P.I. would maximize the choice to users. My more powerful computer is about 10 years old and has 4 gig of RAM, but it manages to run fine almost all the games I tried in Heroic…
4- Also the P.I. could include an entry to install and configure flatpak (installing flatpak support, it’s somewhat hidden dependency on antiX, and adding the flathub repo, optionally adding a .desktop file that launches flathub on the default browser).
5- On the Appimage front, a more polished version of the script I’m currently working on (appimage2menu) could be included in antix-goodies – so, with a single right click from the file managers user can add any appimage to the menu- most users just click icons on the menu, toolbar, or desktop to launch icons, so they would not notice any difference when running an appimage vs an installed package (other than the initial delay, more noticeable on very large appimages on slow devices).This suggestions that anyone can apply (installing ft10-transformation to have access to debinstaller, installing Mx Package Installer that skidoo made available here in the forum and manually installing heroic (and lutris- that I don’t use) and manually install flatpak support and installing a version on my apppimage2menu script) would simplify user’s life in what concerns installing new applications on antiX
Also, a very personal item on this wish-list is including ft10-transformation on P.I. – because it’s meant to help users of other OS get used to antiX, but the only GUI that can be used to install it is Synaptic – that’s too much for a newbie that can’t navigate a new User Interface.
As far as I understand none of my suggestions imply any increase on system resource usage (other than some kb of disk space) and would improve greatly user’s experience and ease of access to new applications.
P.
One more item I think could be added to the Package Installer is a virtual keyboard – it can be considered something like making antiX future proof, since it’s likely that the amount of touch screen users will increase over the years (and here in the forum there were recently 2 posts about installing antiX on a touch device).
P.
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