AntiX Keeps Going For Low-End Computers

[ashkbajw]

I like low-end driven distros, but there's always the usability problem. Some lack apps, good repo systems, usable utilities, and stuff that just works out of the box without having to be half an hour configuring everything so that it can detect your wifi card.
Puppy extreme runs on 32 of ram an only uses 12mb after starting. I could not boot it in a K5 with 16 but it did work with 32, which is still a good number. But again it lacks a lot of stuff that is needed in an desktop for daily activities. And a world of troubles if you need to compile or install something that's not in the repos.
My machine is a 6 core, 8 of ram and a 4hdd raid 0 with 12ms and 700mb/s throughput. And even though my ubuntu with mate is about twice as fast loading programs, those from puppy, load in almost the same time in a K6 at 166 with a crappy 1012mb hdd which tops at 3MB/s read.....
Some stuff just bloats the entire system for the sake of useless stuff like hdd space, or the likes. Why the hell do i need the bluetooth daemon running in the backgroud when i dont even have a bluetooth dongle installed?
Why must i have to disable it when you just need a simple check to know that it's not needed....
Enable it when needed, disable it when not, that's how everything should be be default. Puppy does that.

Windows XP provides everything you would need compared to a gnome 2/mate desktop, loads in seconds compared to any ubuntu. and just needs 512mb to work. With 2gb or ram it goes at light speed.
Years ago the comparison was linux vs windows xp, now it's against windows7 but what has linux given us that windows xp didnt have?

[Grogan]

There's nothing wrong with IceWM... I used that for some time on my Pentium II 266 with 128 Mb of RAM. That's what I had back then... I kept it until around 2001, too cheap to upgrade, (and believe it or not, I used to compile KDE on that box... by the time I got all the dependencies and stuff sorted, it took the better part of a day and all night to compile KDE 2 when it came out. Yeah, it used swap while linking)

I liked those old window managers, like IceWM. You just had to manually edit a few configuration files (only thing really mandatory was fixing up the menus to launch your shit). My favourite was this metallic red and gold oriental theme for IceWM, called Hao Yue.

Sounds like AntiX would be a nice little distro. I'll have to keep it in mind for resurrecting old boxes.

[Fenrin]

AntiX is a great distro! I was long time a Fedora user, but after I experimented with AntiX I soon switched. Now I am using Debian 7 with Gnome 3.

My favourite desktop environment on my AntiX installation is JWM for me. With a beautiful wallpaper and a change of the default theme (in JWM) via one click it really looks quite decent too. Without any programs open the 32bit version of AntiX 13 uses less than 70 MB on my computer.


I just did a quick comparison of how much RAM the different Linuxes I have installed on my system consume without any programs open:

AntiX 13 32bit, JWM 62 MB RAM
Fedora 18 64bit, Gnome 3.6, 410 MB RAM
Debian 7 64bit, Gnome 3.4, 263 MB RAM

My system has 2 GB RAM.

[mark45]

Gosh so far we had like a thousand Linux distros with low-end computers in mind, it's the cheapest and most oversold idea in the Linux world not worth an article, not even mentioning any such distro.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AntiX Keeps Going For Low-End Computers

AntiX 13.1 was released this past week for those looking to load Linux on low-end computers. AntiX isn't a Linux distribution about killing off X.Org, but rather is about running Linux on low-end hardware...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM5NDE