AntiX 19.2

Jonni Bidwell is all for lightweight antics, but projects that make their initial letter lowercase are frowned upon at LXF Towers…

- Jonni Bidwell

The antiX project has been around since 2007. It was originally built to provide a lightweight edition of Warren Woodford’s KDE-based MEPIS distro family, an unsung hero in the battle to make Linux user friendly. MEPIS is no more, but antiX,now based on Debian stable, lives on. Its focus is still the same: to keep things light and useable. You may have heard of MX Linux (master of Distrowatch’s ranking algorithms). That self-described “midweight” distro is based on antiX too, adding a slightly beefier desktop and a generous helping of applications. They share some documentation, which is a little confusing. However, most of the time Debian docs will be sufficient, and the tools unique to antiX are described on its website.

This month’s cover feature extols the virtues of Linux Mint Debian Edition, which is a fine choice to keep 32-bit hardware chugging away. But if you have old hardware, or just want to explore the realms of desktop frugality, antiX is a great place to start. The live environment (and we should say that antiX is ideal for using from a USB thanks to its persistence features) uses IceWM together with Rox (which provides desktop icons) to provide the rudiments of a desktop. You also get a nicely laid-out Conky, which draws system stats thereon.