Earlier I mentioned that the antiX distribution had two releases in development, antiX 19.4 and antiX 21. The first of these has packages from the Debian 10 "Buster" release, which is mature and has many final release updates.
Because of this, antiX 19.4 development completed and antiX 19.4 was released on May 22, 2021.
DistroWatch.com has an article containing the announcement and release details at Distribution Release: antiX 19.4
antiX 19.4 and antiX 21 are currently test releases. The antiX 19.4 test is an incremental update to antiX 19.3. I do not expect that it will need a lot of work and testing. There are just a few things that need fixing; several of them have already been fixed.
The antiX 21 effort, on the other hand, also depends on quite a bit of reworked infrastructure involving major updates to the next Debian release, and also to the fact that the current Gtk release is updating to Gtk+ 3. The additional switch to Python 3 also takes a lot of rework, so this is a bit more of a work in progress. Nevertheless, something that is not new to antiX is that whenever there is a new test release, quite a bit actually works long before everything is perfect, so these are outstanding examples of solid systems. As good as they are, they'd be even better with more testing and testers to do the testing.
antiX has the capability to generate snapshot images and also has the ability to remaster an image.
You may either install these images to a hard drive or you can write them to a removable USB drive.
Sometimes I do both. My current images have been BOTH remastered AND snapshots have been created.
What's cool about these images is that they can serve as a backup for whatever you've done, especially when you create a USB copy.
There are also multiple ways to create them: you can save your entire working environment, including your personal files. This is good for the backup capability. Alternatively you can specify which directories to omit, or you can build only a "general" system version, plus combine snapshot and remastered images by repeatedly building copies as your system is changed.
This is the most flexible and practical way I've seen to combine backup and portable, movable images. Both antiX and MX Linux have similar capabilities, but antiX does more with the light snapshot and remastered images.
