Outside of the pseudo-progressive "Stallmanite"/FOSSphile crowd, fery few even remotely political distros exist-- but then I found AntiX, and I'll let the people behind AntiX explain what its billed as: "antiX Linux – Proudly anti-fascist "antiX Magic" in an environment suitable for old and new computers." Yes, that's right-- an "anti-fascist" distro.
The full AMD-64 ISO is ~1.4GB, which is amazingly good by modern standards (my preferred distro, Mint, comes in at 2.1GB, to compare), and as the description says, its a barebones distro intended for older or lower-powered hardware. That's about where the good things end for me, at least, though, as issues started pouring in, fast.
The interface itself is IceWM, which is lightweight and clean, if a bit unpolished compared to more mainstream environments, such as Xfce and GNOME. Out of the box, it comes with everything you might possibly need (albiet with Mozilla Firefox as the default web browser, courtesy of the anti free-speech antichrists themselves; although Dillo and Links 2 also preincluded, but I have my gripes with the preloaded copy of Dillo).
Listen, I get it, everyone has an ideology to sell, the liberals have to sell pro big-tech snake oil, the conservatives have to sell bogus "alt-tech" snake oil, and the Amish need to sell handmade cabinets. That's life-- however, I do not believe that a web browser preloaded in your Linux distro is the place to express your beliefs. If I voiced my beliefs in that manner, I probably would have no shame left.
Back to the distro itself, given that it idles on about ~220 MB of RAM, its extremely functional for web browsing in a fully graphical browser, such as Mozilla Firefox-- with 2048 MB (2 GB) of RAM allocated to my VM, I was able to easily manage 20+ tabs (primarily text-based websites) in Firefox. I can imagine that a bloat-free Chromium-based browser would perform a little better, however I didn't get around to testing Naver Whale, due to time constraints.
My main non-political, non-Mozilla gripe with AntiX is the sheer amount of bloatware the "full" ISO comes with (a cheap Android comes with less bloatware out-of-the-box). AntiX comes outfitted to do seemingly everything under the sun, whereas most distros come outfitted with LibreOffice, Firefox, and a software center (I guess this could be to atone for the lack of a graphical software repository, however, I would much rather the "full" ISO just come with the commands to install this stuff in a text file).
At the end of the day, AntiX is merely acceptable as a distro for any modern system, superb as a distro for any older system, and unacceptable if you can't take politics in your OS. I'd still advise giving this distro a shot if you have nothing better to do on this particular day-- otherwise, if you have remotely decent hardware, just go for Linux Mint, Fedora, or Lubuntu (or Windows 10, but only if you're willing to spend some time configuring for privacy and security). Download AntiX.
Copyright 2022, Econobox_ (d.b.a konat.neocities.org)
