As I've said before, we usually suggest that people start with an iso that has less on it than they want and build up rather than start with an iso that has more on it and whittle down.
In addition to what anticapitalista said, MX uses the antiX live system which (from my perspective) is what makes snapshots so stable and not flaky. It may seem trivial but it took a lot of hard work from us to make it easy for you. This is tied together with our build-iso system. Broadly speaking it works like this:
Code: Select all
build-iso ==> live ==> installed = \
^ |
| |
====================|
Of course this happens with other distros but I doubt they have it as well integrated and automated as we do. Back when I was building this stuff we had very few devs at antiX and we were trying to put out six iso files every year plus point releases (which could add up to 12 or 18 iso files per year). I thought the only way this would be possible with any kind of reliability or quality control would be if we automated the build process as much as possible.
My focus for the last eight years or so has been to develop our
live system and automate our build system. These are tied together and it only works because the pieces in the diagram above are highly integrated. IMNSHO, this was a big factor in the success of both antiX and MX. The way Mepis and antiX were previously being hand-crafted for each release was simply not sustainable. Too many bugs.
MX was a collaboration between Mepis and antiX. The name comes from the first letter of Mepis and the last letter of antiX. The lead Mepis dev had left. The forums and the community repos and a large number of devs were still here but the ability to put everything together and release an iso was missing. Then Jerry3904 came up with the idea of making a lightweight "version" of Mepis based on XFCE instead of KDE (I'm sure he can add some clarity about this). So, roughly speaking, the community repos, a large developer community, and the forums came from Mepis. The "putting it all together and making an iso" came from antiX. Then the MX XFCE desktop was built fresh, mostly by the previous Mepis devs.
Up until two years ago (I think) anticapitalista was responsible for building both antiX and MX. This was too much work for one human being so dolphin_oracle (originally an antiX dev, I believe) took over building MX. He did a great job! I also got burned out working on two distro releases a year and took last year off. This was the 2nd time we skipped making an annual antiX release. The first was when the antiX devs were focused on getting MX off the ground. IIRC, the first MX release came out about 4 or 6 months after Jerry's original idea. This was only possible because we already had so much of our antiX build system automated.
HTH
).
