Congratulations to the Debian team on the release of the new “Stable” ie: “Buster”. It’s a tremendous accomplishment by one of the largest non-profit linux distribution on the planet.

So what does that mean for current MX users?

In short, your existing Stretch-based MX 18 will continue to receive updates from Debian and MX for at least 18 months. You don’t have to do anything. We have pointed our repository definitions to the distro name version of Debian’s repositories, so you don’t have to worry about “stable” changing. If you manually changed your repositories to point to “stable”, do not update and change them back. If you update from “stable” rather than “stretch”, your system will be hosed. Your only recourse in that event is to reinstall.

We are currently working on the next MX release, MX-19, based on Debian Buster and antiX 19. Part of our plan is to include the lastest Xfce 4.14, which is due to be released in August. So we hope to release MX-19 in late fall.

Right now we cannot guarantee that users will be able to do an in-place upgrade between MX-18 and MX-19. This is not a change from past policy. Even if its possible, it may not be recommended. More info on that as we continue development.

For those that want to know, the plan is right now that MX-19 will ship with sysVinit as the default init system, with systemd also installed for those that want to use it (good if you like snaps). In other words, pretty much just like MX-17 and 18. We are testing builds internally right now, but betas will be public. Stay tuned.

If you want a sneak peak at the antiX live system changes coming up in MX-19, check out the antiX 19 public betas at antixlinux.com.