MX-14 Review

[DBeckett]

My first coding was in 1973 (in High School) on a PDP-8e with 8kb core memory shared between 4 teletype terminals. Punched paper tape for storage. Every byte counted. Those of us who learned in that era seem to take resource usage into account more than later generations who had megabytes or gigabytes to play with rather than kilobytes.
I'm not dissing those programmers - different circumstances lead to different emphases. And the Arduino & similar systems have reintroduced coders to dealing with resource constraints.

Not to mention the time constraints, with processors clocking at 1 and 2 MHz. Often the challenge was trying to accomplish a task as fast as possible, oftentimes requiring a trade off with size. That's part of my fascination with MX — so much has been crammed into a predetermined small space, AND it's fast as well. The devs have an awful lot to be really proud of.

[DBeckett]

It was fun when I was young...

Now you sound like my wife...

*Ba-da-boom*

[Jerry3904]

Thread is unraveling...time to knot it up.

[anticapitalista]

To get back on topic as someone queried how MX-14 manages to use such low RAM usage compared to other distros.

As BitJam pointed out, it is in the design and philosophy of how we build antiX that also got transferred (on the whole) to MX-14. There is no fluke.

Added: Have a look here at the same author's review of antiX-13.1 and its RAM usage compared to others:

http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.gr/2013/ ... uperb.html

Basically it is a combination of these 2 factors.

1. The Debian kernel we use and Debian kernels in general have very low RAM usage compared to many others.

2. We have removed 'cruft' (actually we attempt to make sure it doesn't get installed) and thet results in a decrease in the number of services being used therefore lower RAM usage.

Now, if user wants to further reduce RAM, it is possible by disabling services that you do not need. This option is available at installation or can be done after installation. One way to 'greatly' reduce the RAM is to disable network manager and samba (if you don't need it) and use ceni instead for networking.
For the very adventurous and for those that do not need any auto-mounting and users who know what they are doing, all of the gvfs apps/libs can be removed and replaced with udisks as an alternative.

This brings me to another plus for MX-14 that has been mentioned before, but I think it is worth repeating. It is extremely customisable, not only because Xfce is, but all aspects of the distro can be personalised and still keep a low footprint eg as some users have done by adding KDE.

[joany]

This brings me to another plus for MX-14 that has been mentioned before, but I think it is worth repeating. It is extremely customisable, not only because Xfce is, but all aspects of the distro can be personalised and still keep a low footprint eg as some users have done by adding KDE.

You're absolutely right. I'm one of those users who opted for KDE with MX-14, and the footprint is smaller, it's faster than any other installation I've done, and it's rock-solid stable. All this after I went with the default services (nothing removed), enabled compositing, and added a lot of software to the base installation, while leaving the xfce side as it was OOTB. Kudos to anticapitalista and his team for weaving some real magic.

[karieho]

Here is another preview:

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/antix-mx-14.html

[NGIB]

Jeez, what a hack job. I do know that he's a KDE maven and aesthetics are a big deal to him...

[richb]

Wow! Not a fan.

[anticapitalista]

No surprise at all. He loves his bling.

[Gaer Boy]

Give me function over form, every time. I don't paint pretty flowers over my car doors, and for the most part I prefer plain and simple in my OS. He does have one reasonable criticism that will probably recur - QupZilla is a little flawed. I don't know that there's much alternative within the size limit.