Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn in 2007 was my first Linux OS. In 2026, I'm using Anti-X. Here's why.

4-23-26: Update I've switched to Bodhi Linux on my Toshiba laptop.                                             

Linux was not my first OS. Windows 95 was. I've also used System 3 on an old Mac SE from the late 80s to "learn how to use computers." The old GNOME 2 desktop environment that it used at the time is now known as MATE. It is still offered by Anti-X. It has a lot of similarities with the Macintosh from 1984. It's an OS design that hasn't changed in more than 40 years. Because it simply works. 

I have a few old computers that I like to use for writing or researching- I don't always need my fastest PC for doing everything. But when I installed the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (yes, I know the 26.04 LTS is being released in a few days), I ran an update. On a 4GB machine it was slow, because it implements swap by default. The new Ubuntu also requires 6GB of RAM. On my AMD A8-3850, 4GB of RAM should be plenty fast for a quad core CPU. So I needed something lighter. 

I've tried hundreds of linux distros. It's rarely been my daily driver, but I may use it more often now that Windows 11 will fold like walls collapsing over my desktop environment- it is just too unwieldy and it's just not interesting anymore. Windows got a lot of things right, like a crisp pixel perfect resolution for desktops. There is an article that explains how they did it, but I won't search for it now.

What I will discuss is the installation steps to have a less stressful OS on an older system that isn't as speed aware. The reason swap is a terrible idea on an old drive is that older hard drives just aren't as fast with I/O, so they are going to unnecessarily transfer data to your disk before you are anywhere near reaching your RAM limit. I would rather my PC crash or tell me I need to exit one or multiple applications before resorting to swap space. While I have plenty of SSDs, I have several HDDs with 8-64KB of hybrid cache, which gives them plenty of boost and allows the drives to still serve a purpose, like storing larger files that I don't want to place on a 512GB or 1TB NVMe drive because I have limited space.

If you notice, I unchecked "create a swap file." Other OSes do offer this option, and I always choose it, because it is time consuming to disable after it is installed, and sometimes isn't even a permanent option. Even Ubuntu offers the option to disable swap during the installation, but it is hidden in the "Something else" menu, and that can make it seem like an entirely manual installation is required. Here, it is just a checkbox after choosing the how to install it- I chose erase disk and use entire partition. The checkbox for swap appears on the next screen. It would be best if this is the default option. But at least I can see the option in the standard install steps. There may be many reasons why swap space is needed, but I haven't run into a reason for needing one yet. I don't work for NASA, and I don't have an astronomical amount of data that I need to store in memory at any given time.

If you also notice in the above picture, I am using sysVinit. I have heard a lot of things about systemd, and I personally am not too familiar with all of the things, but I do like having options. In fact Anti-X displays several init systems at bootup. You can even choose between 5.0 and 6.0 kernels. If it improves performance I will choose one or the other. But on a quad core system, a 6.0 isn't going to be slower, most likely. A non-systemd init, however, will likely run faster. 

I now have AntiX 26.0 installed, and it was released around a month ago. 

If you notice in the above image, there is no swap space. It only appeared during the live CD session (live USB). Even in the age of SSDs, swap makes very little sense for light computer use.

There were a few more tweaks I wanted to adjust. The first is WorkSpaceNames needed to be 1. On various OSes, I sometimes get the mouse stuck on the workspace window toggles, and by scrolling the wheel up and down, it ends up toggling between the 3 or 4 workspaces. I find this incredibly annoying. Even if AntiX doesn't fall into that trap, I don't like the idea of accidentally clicking on the boxes when I am trying to click on the menu bar, and then having all the windows disappear. My monitor isn't that small either, so I am not in need of extra window space. But I understand why someone might want that. It's just not a default setting I prefer. 

I googled the solution, and it offered a config file fix, but the problem is that it wouldn't let me save override the file while icewm was in session. So for perennial newbs like me, that wasn't practical and that's why I'm not including the instructions here on how to do that. What did work was this:

"Alternatively, use the graphical IceWM Control Center (Menu -> Desktop -> IceWM -> Control Center)"

 Clicking the box to the left of "Workspace indicator on/off" allows it the extra windows to disappear.

You can also use the Package Installer to install Xfce, MATE, LXDE, and other window managers. I like Xfce and LXDE, but since the PC isn't very old or slow, Xfce and MATE provide a smoother user experience. You can also right click on the 4 Workspace icons in the taskbar after you install these, and click the "-" button to 1.

Conky is an embedded system monitor that is layered over the wallpaper. I generally don't mind it, but I wanted the system monitor /resource monitor installed too.  I found mate-system-monitor 

You can also use htop in terminal, which provides more info than conky.

 That was actually my third request- the system monitor. The second one was thicker window borders. When I searched for the result, it said that ice-wm requires you to change the theme. But all the themes only changed the colors and size of the windows. I realized that there wasn't a simple fix. So what I found was a keyboard shortcut that I didn't know about: Alt+right click the window to resize. I am surprised I didn't know about this earlier, but I've relied on sufficiently thick window borders for many years. The problem is that with newer monitors, like 1440p, the iceWM window borders are extremely thin. Like absolute minimum- 1 pixel wide. And that means you spend a lot of time stabilizing the mouse on that single border, when they could just make a proportionally thick border. I realized it's just faster to learn a new keyboard shortcut. 

Meanwhile, I learned that KDE offers an "oversized" border option:

https://imgur.com/W5SEwg7 

 https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8gl2fk/why_dont_xfce_developers_fix_the_window_resize/

I've read that KDE is most similar to Microsoft Windows, and I can see why they offer these options. For some though, it a lot harder to say the customer is always right.

So, while writing this, I did find another option to mitigate, but not always solve the thin border issue:  https://antixlinux.com/forum-archive/mouse-sensitivity-icewm-t6680.html

Basically, it's designating the mouse to appear "fuzzier" so that it hovers over something and doesn't quite change until it is more clearly over. 

There are other solutions too: https://absinthe.tuxfamily.org/antix/docs-antiX-21/FAQ/wingrid.html#_placing_a_window_into_the_grid Like many users, some people opt to change OSes instead of learning a new trick. It often saves time. I changed OSes because I wanted an option to opt-out of swap. Others changed OSes because they wanted an easy way to resize a window without relying on two hands. This is why linux remains balkanized. And RISC-V is falling into the same trap.