funny story: how I "misused" antiX

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lonesomepoint
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Joined: Thu Oct 25, 2012 2:34 pm

funny story: how I "misused" antiX

#1 Post by lonesomepoint »

I just recommended antiX to someone wanting a distro for an old computer, on the grounds that it's easy to use for that purpose, and it made me think of of something intellectually amusing. That all the time I used antiX (from early 2011 to late 2014, when I learned of MX and switched to it), I was arguably "misusing" antiX or "using it inappropriately," in the sense of using the distro in ways it wasn't really intended for. (I thought this proved my oint that antiX is easy to use, in that a novice like me could use it creatively.)

I switched from the then-active MEPIS to antiX, in early 2011 (I think). I seem to have forgotten exactly why, but it was certainly for one of two reasons: the MEPIS team chose to continue using KDE for its new MEPIS 11 after KDE established its all-new version 4, and KDE 4 was simply not acceptable to me. I started looking for a new distro, and the first distro brought to my attention (probably by the MEPIS website or one of the community forums) was antiX, since it was closely related to MEPIS. (I have no idea anymore why I didn't just install a different desktop on MEPIS 11. Likely something intermediate happened that I've forgotten. Possibly I did that for a little while, but gave up MEPIS anyway simply because I was annoyed at it.)

I installed a copy of antiX, but quickly determined it would pose problems: the IceWM desktop was slightly more difficult than I wanted, and I also had no interest in any the smaller applications Anticapitalista included. The software MEPIS had included had suited me perfectly well. About the only antiX application I simply accepted was the Wicd network manager, because I learned it quickly and because making antiX use MEPIS's network manager would have been some trouble. So, rather than moving on to another distro, I took a chainsaw to antiX on a superficial level. I uninstalled almost all the unfamiliar software and installed as much of the stuff I liked in MEPIS as I could use here. LibreOffice; my preferred audio player; and the KDE Trinity desktop, among others. For a novice user, I made the changes quite easily; and I continued using antiX. Later (sometime before MX appeared), I switched from Trinity to XFCE. At that point, my modified antiX on the surface generally resembled the future MX.

It's just that I have to laugh at myself: this defeated Anticapitalista's purpose for antiX; and I was replacing Anticapitalista's software choices with mine every time I installed a new copy of antiX (at least until I discovered remastering), when I could have found a distro that was a more natural fit for me. It was like deliberately buying an automobile I didn't like, and immediately tearing apart and rebuilding the entire exterior body. All I can say is I didn't mind the extra time spent uninstalling and installing software--it was too easy.
Last edited by lonesomepoint on Sat Nov 25, 2017 8:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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BitJam
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Re: funny story: how I "misused" antiX

#2 Post by BitJam »

Team antiX has gone to great lengths to make antiX easy to customize. I think of the three (or four) flavours as starting points for customization. It might have been slightly easier for you to have started with core or base because there would have been less for you to uninstall. If you look in the older forums, you will see that anticapitalisa has provided several tutorials on how to add X and a window manager to a core antiX system. Someone else posted a video runthrough of how to do it starting with antiX-17-core. With the addition the cli-aptiX tool for installing packages, customizing starting with core has gotten even easier.

Despite your efforts to misuse antiX, you ended up doing exactly what antiX was designed for. You were then a snapshot or live-remaster away from having your own custom system that you could run live, share with friends, or install on multiple machines. Since MX uses the same live system as antiX, you can do the same thing starting with MX if you want.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."

-- Richard Feynman

lonesomepoint
Posts: 135
Joined: Thu Oct 25, 2012 2:34 pm

Re: funny story: how I "misused" antiX

#3 Post by lonesomepoint »

Yes, and actually, I did get into remastering. I made my own custom liveCDs any number of times, and also used the liveUSB maker for a while before running into problems that demonstrated the limits of what that software could do at that time. But by that time, you designers weren't far away from introducing MX, and it was what I wanted all along--as I said, my modifications to antiX made it look basically like MX.

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