MX/antiX exclusives usable on other distros? [Solved]

[doodstecsonhere]

What's keeping you in MX Linux? Do you love MX Linux and distrohopping at the same time? Hehe.

I wonder if the antiX/MX Live USB persistence tools can be used with other distros, especially non-Debian based ones. Is it possible in a practical way?

Upon an initial search here in the forum, I gather it seems MX Conky Manager and related conky tools/goodies can be replicated somewhat in other distros. Has anyone here done it? Please share. :)

And MX Snapshot? What's the best alternative you think to MX Snapshot but for other distros? It seems the user friendliness of MX Snapshot is unmatched, but I'm seeking how I can replicate all the goodies of MX when I'm distrohopping about in an unfamiliar distro.

The Boot Options and Boot Repair, and User Installed Apps tool I find also amazing to replicate this experience with other distros.

Oh and MXPI: I've never seen a gui app store handle the removal of flatpaks and their runtimes sooo freakin' easily.

With other distros I've tried, I can uninstall the flatpak with the gui app store, but the runtimes and related files would still be occupying large space somewhere.

[chrispop99]

You missed an important point about MX Linux that makes it unique, and also would make it difficult to implement the tools in other distros.

MX Linux boots with sysvinit but default, but still allows things to run that require systemd to be present. That's the hidden magic of this distro.

Chris

[doodstecsonhere]

You missed an important point about MX Linux that makes it unique, and also would make it difficult to implement the tools in other distros.

MX Linux boots with sysvinit but default, but still allows things to run that require systemd to be present. That's the hidden magic of this distro.

Chris

@chrispop99 I wasn't attempting to speak for all of us: only speaking for myself off the top of my head but yeah that's pretty cool, too. Best of both worlds.

Altho I don't like not having the ability to use AppImages by using sysvinit. Also there's a bug for me right now (MX23) in sysvinit that doesn't exist in systemd: default sound issues in sysvinit at boot.

Having said this tho, I would still like figuring out how to have sysvinit-systemd magic in other distros as well, but not as much as the other exclusive features I mentioned.

[chrispop99]

AppImages work fine when booting with sysvinit; it's Snap packages that don't.

Personally I would be unlikely to run an AppImage, and would never use Snaps.

Chris

[doodstecsonhere]

AppImages work fine when booting with sysvinit; it's Snap packages that don't.

Personally I would be unlikely to run an AppImage, and would never use Snaps.

Chris

I'm indifferent to snaps also. I only run 1 AppImage so far: Normcap for OCR grabbing text on my screen by selecting a region: useful for copy pasting text on paused videos and text that refuse to be copied by traditional means. Normcap has a Pypi app, too but I couldn't get it to open with a keyboard shortcut so far. Once I figure it out, I'm off AppImages too haha.

[asqwerth]

A few of Garuda Linux's tools are based off of MX's tools. For example their Boot Options and Boot Repair tools.

See for instance: https://gitlab.com/garuda-linux/applica ... type=heads

Of course, they have made changes or added functionality to make it work better for them.

I think 1 or 2 others (network assistant?) are as well. Just check their gitlab list of Garuda applications. If Adrian or Dolphin Oracle or MX is mentioned, it's adapted from MX's tools.

Regarding Appimages, it's not that the appimage format requires systemd. For instance, Krita and Libreoffice appimages work just fine with sysvinit. However, some of the applications themselves that you wish to use as appimages may not have been packaged with the necessary sysvinit service scripts.

PS. nothing against Garuda. I'm a multibooter and have a VM of Garuda.

[MXRobo]

FYI for OCR:
gimagereader - Graphical GTK+ front-end to tesseract-ocr.
gimagereader (GUI for tesseract-ocr), must also install a tesseract-ocr-"language" ex: tesseract-ocr-eng to work.

[doodstecsonhere]

A few of Garuda Linux's tools are based off of MX's tools. For example their Boot Options and Boot Repair tools.

See for instance: https://gitlab.com/garuda-linux/applica ... type=heads

Of course, they have made changes or added functionality to make it work better for them.

I think 1 or 2 others (network assistant?) are as well. Just check their gitlab list of Garuda applications. If Adrian or Dolphin Oracle or MX is mentioned, it's adapted from MX's tools.

Regarding Appimages, it's not that the appimage format requires systemd. For instance, Krita and Libreoffice appimages work just fine with sysvinit. However, some of the applications themselves that you wish to use as appimages may not have been packaged with the necessary sysvinit service scripts.

PS. nothing against Garuda. I'm a multibooter and have a VM of Garuda.

You didn't sound like you were being negative on Garuda. If they're giving credit where credit is due by mentioning the MX Team where appropriate then it's all good: especially for us users who can enjoy a sort of "MX Linux for Arch" in Garuda Linux haha. Here we go again I will try Garuda for the first time in live environment.

Btw, thank you for the clarification on "appimages that may not have been packaged with the necessary sysvinit service scripts" @asqwerth . :)

[doodstecsonhere]

FYI for OCR:
gimagereader - Graphical GTK+ front-end to tesseract-ocr.
gimagereader (GUI for tesseract-ocr), must also install a tesseract-ocr-"language" ex: tesseract-ocr-eng to work.

Thanks for the recommendation @MXRobo . :) It's pretty close to the simple functionality of Normcap (Linux/Windows) and TextGrab (Windows) where I just grab the text straight to the clipboard from anything displayed on the screen. Gimagereader looks to be a more powerful tool, I'll probably use it soon.

[asqwerth]

...especially for us users who can enjoy a sort of "MX Linux for Arch" in Garuda Linux haha. Here we go again I will try Garuda for the first time in live environment.

....

They do have some interesting tools of their own, eg System Maintenance, and their iso downloader tool that utilises zsync.

But back to the topic - I think a fair number of the MX tools are a series of scripts/commands structured into a Qt graphical interface (of course that's an extreme simplification!).

To the extent that said commands are roughly similar across distro families (eg boot options tool will use commands that relate to grub or efibootmgr or plymouth, or editing their respective configurations), I guess they can be imported to different distros with appropriate adjustments.

"User-installed-packages" tool will probably translate well to Debian/Ubuntu-based distros with the same package management, if other parties actually wanted to adapt it. But since Arch uses pacman and not apt/dpkg/aptitude, UIP won't translate directly for Arch/derivatives.