another nice mx release

I'm taking a look at the recently released MX-19 "patito feo" (odd codename choice -- translates into "ugly duckling"), which is based on Debian Buster and antiX-19:

MX-19 ships with the Xfce desktop environment and a nice selection of apps and tools, including Firefox, Galculator, FeatherPad, Thunar, Geany, GIMP, nomacs, inxi, the LibreOffice suite, VLC media player, qpdfview, GParted, Synaptic, and the excellent collection of MX Tools.

The official release announcement can be found here: https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-19-patito-feo-released/

the latest from antiX

antiX-19 "Marielle Franco" was released a few days ago. Here's a shot of the default IceWM desktop:

antiX-19, based on Debian Buster, ships without systemd (for those who want to avoid that init system). This very lightweight distro packs lots of great tools, and it's a great option for installations on low-spec computers, or even simply for running live sessions from a flash drive. It's one of the speediest distros I've tried.

Four different window managers (IceWM, fluxbox, jwm, and herbstluftwm) are included. Users can switch between a few different variations of IceWM, fluxbox, and jwm from within the current session (Desktop > Other Desktops), which is convenient:

I didn't see an easy way to switch to herbstluftwm. Here's a link to a tutorial, for those who are interested: https://herbstluftwm.org/tutorial.html

Among the items I found in the menu were Firefox ESR, Galculator, Geany, MPV Media Player, GParted, Leafpad,  the LibreOffice suite, Mirage, muPDF, nano, qpdfview, rox-filer file manager, roxterm, SpaceFM, Synaptic, and XMMS. I also found a handful of antiX's own special tools (Applications > antiX), like the very useful Live USB Maker:

I thought it was an interesting choice to give antiX-19 the codename "Marielle Franco". She was a Brazilian politician, feminist, and human rights activist; check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marielle_Franco

For more info about antiX-19, see the release announcement: https://antixlinux.com/antix-19-isos-available/

excellent xfce live session

The Debian Stable-based SolydXK 10 was released on September 27, 2019: https://solydxk.com/news/solydxk-10-released-based-on-debian-buster-1

SolydXK offers two isos: SolydX (with Xfce) and SolydK (with KDE Plasma). I took a look at the "SolydX 64-bit" version in live sessions from a flash drive, on a couple of different computers.

The SolydXK website recommends using the dd command to write the iso to media, but I used the cp command as shown here, from the ~/downloads directory:

$ cd downloads
$ sudo cp solydx_10_64_201909.iso /dev/sdb && sync

I had no problems booting either computer with the flash drive. SolydX presents a nice, basic Xfce setup with a customized theme.

SolydX ships with a nice collection of apps, inluding Firefox ESR, LibreOffice, VLC, Ristretto, USB Creator, Mousepad, Thunar, Synaptic, Galculator, GParted, xfce4-terminal, inxi, rsync, mc, and xfce4-terminal.

I like that SolydXK is so closely based on Buster, the current Debian Stable. Here's a look at the SolydXK soures.list file:

solydxk@solydxk:/etc/apt$ cat sources.list
deb https://repository.solydxk.com solydxk-10 main upstream import
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main contrib non-free

I haven't yet taken a look at the SolydK version of SolydXK 10, but the SolydX live session rates up there with the best I've seen.

SolydXK at DistroWatch: https://www.distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=solydxk

SolydXK home page: https://solydxk.com/