Distros That Run on PCs Made 20 Years Ago and Don't Use Systemd

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 22, 2025

Betas for now

There's a new beta (or betas) release today. It's "MX-25 “Infinity” and there are 7 options or flavours. 3 of these use sysVinit:

Some of these are made to run on very old PCs, as users can attest. It's made "to combine an elegant and efficient desktop with simple configuration, high stability, solid performance and medium-sized footprint." Some versions are so lean that they can run on PCs from 20 years ago, ones that do not even support 64-bit.

To quote: "MX-25 beta 1 is now available for testing. MX-25 is built from debian 13 “trixie” and MX repositories, along with the antiX live system. Systemd and sysVinit editions are provided and supported. For those that want them, the Xfce, Xfce-ahs, and Fluxbox releases are available in sysVinit variants. sysVinit isos are clearly labeled such in the file name. Reasons for this change from past editions are in this blog post."

The blog post explained last month that:

The first major change is that instead of having systemd and sysVinit on the same iso, we will have separate isos for each init system. Our systemd-shim packages, which in the past allowed us to ship both systemd and sysVinit on a single iso, are not currently workable with the latest 6.12 kernels from Debian. The effect is that sysVinit and systemd will not be able to co-exist on the same iso or installation.

For maximum compatibility with the Debian ecosystem, the standard Xfce, Fluxbox, and KDE releases will utilize systemd. There will be sysVinit versions of the Xfce and Fluxbox releases as well. You still have a choice, you just have to make it at download rather than boot time.

Over the last year we have been working on the live system so that it will work better with systemd as init, and almost everything works. However, the live system, when run on systemd, will not offer “semi-automatic” persistence file saving. That is not actually a change, but up till now most users never saw the distinction. “Automatic” and “Manual” save options still work under systemd. The “static” persistence options do not care what init system is used, so there are no changes to those features and they work as they did before. All that said, users that run a straight live system may want to stick with sysVinit as the live system was originally designed with sysVinit in mind.

There's some media coverage about it today, e.g. [1, 2].

And the Serial Slopper? Of course he's already at it:

Slopfarms gonna slop. █