Robin
antiX full is a good, reasonably lightweight, starting point and IMHO Must be kept that way.
I second you. This is what I had thought immedialy when reading the original proposal.
While actually many (most) users hitting the board with newbie questions seem to have chosen base instead of full, so the idea of either dropping base, or at least explicitly state, that this base is meant for experienced users who are able to deal with obstacles like missing firmware, drivers or tools on their own.
much more than full, gimp plus plugins, darktable, Blender, Scribus, Librewolf, UngoogledChromium, Vivaldi for government services
etc are all or in part essential
This is precisely what I also do with antiX full on each next major version upgrade also, when remastering my personal standard USB Boot device for live usage. I have a really long listing of tools and programs I add by default, this takes much time until everything is set up finally. And I guess that is what most users will do: personalising their antiX full by adding programs and tools for whatever needs. antiX full is a good base for starting.
Let’s wait for people advocating for base, since there may exist a need for this flavour, even when I can’t see it: The days, when even base could fit on a CD medium are long gone. So, what’s the use of base nowadays? Users, experienced enough to tailor their system from base and make it work without stumbling over missing drivers, are also able to easily purge whatever they don’t need from full…
So the same time I second this part of the original proposal:
How about removing the Base iso as an offering,
More than once I advise friends to START out with Full, not Base, because they think that merely due to iso-size, it is more “lightweight” in operation.
From my experience and findings antiX full works fine even on really old hardware, e.g. on my 21 years old 32 bit single core notebook with 2 GiB RAM merely, absolutely fast, fluent and lightwight.
Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.