AntiX is providing media with the traditional init system and also offered a Runit version of 19.2. It seemed identical to the main edition in all other aspects and passed with flying colours here. The only reason I'm not running it at the moment is that my main workhorse is so insanely powerful, for my needs, that I rather opted for a full DE and, already having something else installed, have been too lazy to wipe it and start again.
Debian 11 is due out probably some time in late summer. So, on the third of January of this new year 2021 the first testing image of the next AntiX release hit Distrowatch. Which shows the AntiX people are really on the ball.
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| AntiX 'Bullseye' Alpha 1 - default wallpaper and desktop with the custom Control Centre open |
This being an early development snapshot I only tested it in Virtualbox for a quick look. Of note is the to me new default of IceWM when older releases always booted into Fluxbox. This might have changed in 19.x already, just thought I should mention it. You get the usual good assortment of tools, a mixture of homebrew AntiX-specific ones and other tools available in the main Debian repositories like Gdebi. Maintaining its own collection really sets the project apart though. Most if not all are accessible through the AntiX Control Centre where one can complete all sorts of admin tasks as well as change preferences, from respinning and backing up the current install to ISO to changing the wallpaper. If you are familiar with AntiX I don't need to tell you what's possible with this distro. If you are not - check it out.
What stood out how incredibly fast it is in Virtualbox. Another nice attention to detail is a boot option that has been added to Grub2 in the live image to use the Virtualbox display driver. Choosing this the desktop dynamically resizes to take advantage of the full screen resolution, something that many more distributions used to do but sadly no longer. Another sign of the waning euphoria and interest among developers?
To summarize, this is mostly good ol' AntiX on a fresh base, same desktop layout and menu, same design, perhaps with a few more tools packed that weren't there before but it's hard to be sure - this distro has always been chock full. It's definitely improved over much older releases of the 11 and 13 generation I took a look at and since AntiX 17 this little distro is pretty much perfect in my book. If I had a spare laptop at the moment I'ld definitely install it.
Looking forward to pulling the KDE Plasma 5.20 meta in via the AntiX Package installer.