antiX 26.1 is a quiet bug-fix release on Debian 13 with five boot-time init choices and official 32-bit images. No headline features — just a reminder that your drawer of forgotten laptops still has a purpose.

The antiX project released antiX 26.1 ("Stephen Kapos") this week, a bug-fix update to the antiX 26 series that launched in March. It is built on Debian 13 "Trixie", and the most important line in the announcement is almost an anti-headline: anyone already running antiX 26 can simply update rather than reinstall.

What makes antiX worth your attention is not the changelog but the philosophy, and 26.1 is that philosophy at full strength. The release ships with five init systems — runit (the default), SysVinit, dinit, s6-rc, and s6-66 — selectable at boot. systemd and libsystemd0 are absent. So are elogind and libelogind0. The distro uses eudev instead of udev. That is not a configuration accident; it is the entire point of the project.

The trade-offs are real and worth stating plainly. Without systemd and elogind, there is no GNOME and no KDE — the GNOME stack has hard systemd dependencies these days. There are no snaps (systemd) and no flatpaks (elogind). Instead of a desktop environment you get window managers: IceWM by default, plus Fluxbox, JWM, and the tiling herbstluftwm, with zzzFM, ROX Filer, and mc for file management. What you lose in polish you gain in resources: antiX idles in the low hundreds of megabytes of RAM, where a modern GNOME session can eat a gigabyte before you open anything.

The release comes in two flavors, each for 64-bit and 32-bit hardware: Full (about 2 GB, a ready-to-use desktop with LibreOffice, Firefox ESR, Claws Mail, CUPS, and media tools like Celluloid, MPV, and Xine) and Core (about 660 MB, a minimal base for building your own setup). The default kernel is a customized 5.10.256, with a customized 6.6.139 available on the 64-bit Full edition for newer hardware. Keeping official 32-bit images makes antiX one of the few current distributions still serving older 32-bit machines. The 64-bit Full image defaults to PipeWire and WirePlumber for audio; the 32-bit build stays on ALSA. Known issue, per the developers: some Bluetooth mice may not be detected.

Here is the operator's read: antiX is not really competing with Ubuntu or Fedora. It is competing with the landfill. The machines it targets — Core 2 Duo laptops, Atom netbooks, thin clients like the Dell Wyse 3040, that ThinkPad in your closet — run modern mainstream distros badly or not at all. A Full image that boots to a working desktop with a browser and an office suite on 15-year-old hardware is not nostalgia; it is a practical answer to "what do I do with this thing."

A few concrete jobs antiX is genuinely good at: a live-boot rescue USB that actually boots ancient hardware; a kiosk or single-purpose appliance built from the Core image; a lightweight lab for learning how init systems differ, since you can switch between five of them from the boot menu; and a media box for local video and music on low-spec machines, where MPV's efficiency matters more than a compositor's blur effects.

In an era when desktop environments keep getting heavier and 32-bit support keeps quietly disappearing, a community project shipping five init systems and two kernel choices on a 660 MB base image is doing something the big distros have stopped doing: treating old hardware as a user base instead of a rounding error. If you have a machine the rest of the world has forgotten, antiX 26.1 is the reminder that it still works.

Sources: antiX Linux: antiX-26.1 released · Linuxiac: antiX 26.1 released as a Debian 13-based systemd-free Linux · The Register: Systemd-free antiX 26