If you read the MX Linux 25.1 Infinity beta announcement and thought it felt thin, you’re not imagining it. MX didn’t spill many details, but the implication behind it is bigger than the post suggests. MX is officially restoring one of the defining ideas that set it apart in the Linux world: let users pick their init system and don’t make a fuss about it.
That sounds small, but over the last decade systemd became one of the most polarizing topics inside Linux. Debian adopted it. Ubuntu rolled with it. Most major distros embraced it, while a loud and technically competent corner of the community spent years resisting. MX quietly found itself caught between two camps. It offered systemd support for compatibility and sysvinit for people who didn’t want that shift forced on them. Eventually it split into separate ISOs, which solved a problem but created a different one.
MX-25.1 walks that back. Xfce, KDE Plasma, and Fluxbox editions now ship with both sysvinit and systemd on a single image. Boot the live media, choose what you want, and the installer assumes that’s your intent. MX avoids doubling its build farm effort and users get freedom again without hunting for the “right” download link.
The project also hints at another motivation it doesn’t say directly. MX-23’s systemd-shim setup caused quirky problems with polkit and dbus. Anyone who saw missing root escalation pop-ups knows exactly how frustrating that could get. The team thinks the new boot-time split clears those issues out without hacks. If true, that alone justifies revisiting how the distro bundles init components.
What the announcement does not say, but matters, is that MX is threading a needle many distros gave up on. Debian keeps sysvinit in the repos, but nobody who prefers it is being handed a smooth, curated path outside MX or antiX. Devuan exists, but it lacks the polish and user-friendly flavor that makes MX one of the most approachable Linux systems for normal people. MX isn’t just keeping sysvinit alive as a checkbox. It’s shipping a desktop that actually works out of the box with it.
The antiX shout-out also deserves more oxygen. antiX is one of the only projects aggressively experimenting with init diversity. MX is essentially adopting the safest slice of that work. People who want five or six competing init systems on one machine know where to go. People who want something sensible get MX.
Beta testers are being pointed at the installer, persistence, remastering, and odd runtime behavior where two init systems might crash into each other. The team wants normal usage feedback, not synthetic benchmarks or flame wars. Snapshots won’t inherit dual boot menus automatically, which hints the tooling is still being welded together.
The quiet final takeaway is almost philosophical. MX is signalling that it still cares about giving people choice even when the rest of Linux has decided that systemd is “done.” It may not be flashy. There’s no AI assistant bolted into the terminal. Nothing in the changelog screams feature race. But a lot of long-time Linux users will get a small jolt of satisfaction knowing MX is still stubborn enough to build things around user preference instead of fashion.
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