Phrased as a rhetorical question in the topic title.
The ControlCentre package for antiX17 does now list webkit as a dependency.

Whadda?

OIC, the shiny mxbootrepair tool, it contains an"About" button.
Clicking the"About" button provides a"link" to read the licence... in a webkit-powered"mxviewer" component.

adding a 14Mb (40Mb?) dependency, for the sake of displaying a should-be-plaintext license file... is an obscenity.
Ain't hardly no reason, 'cept SHINY, for the QT code to not load the license file into the system's default text editor.

The MX distro, with its 245Mb default 'papiris' iconset, is off the rails, IMO... but hey, to each his own.
OTOH, witnessing this"shiny, at whatever cost" mindset spilling over into antiX is alarming.



/soapbox

Remove mx-viewer and then do apt-get autoremove. Then you'll see how wrong you are. (2MB is added not 14/40)

These are the depends for latest control-centre

Depends: gtkdialog, yad, geany, leafpad, lxappearance, sysv-rc-conf, rxvt-unicode, wallpaper-antix, arandr, gparted, partimage, grsync, mountbox-antix, live-usb-maker-gui, inxi-gui-antix, ds-mouse-antix, alsa-utils, set-screen-blank-antix, codecs-antix, lxterminal, artwork17-antix, arc-theme, grubcc-antix, packageinstaller, packageinstaller-pkglist

No 'list webkit as a dependency' as far as I can see.

Hmm, I had stifled my grumbling since discovering this yesterday(?) while tracking down the other webkit stuff...
...and when posting today, I incorrectly stated"now lists as dependency".

Flip the coin, try another tack ~~ when you attempt to purge the webkit* libs,
does dpkg warn that ControlCentre (along with other affected packages) will be removed if you proceed?

sorry for no cut/paste, im running antix in qemu:

# apt-get remove mx-viewer
the following packages will be REMOVED:
bootrepair-antix codex-antix control-centre-antix packageinstaller (a couple others.)

# apt-get remove libqt5webkit5
similar results, including control-centre-antix

# apt-get remove libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37
removes gufw

# apt list | grep installed | grep webkit
only showed libqt5webkit5 and libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37

It's understandable if anticapitalista is just considering"package size".
From the perspective of a liveboot user wanting to use toram boot option though, the frivolous libqt5webkit5 dependency represents"baked-in extra ~40Mb livesession overhead".

im sympathetic, but for the sake of facts, are you sure that toram (which i use all the time on low-ram machines, like 1.5 g) copies the UNCOMPRESSED image to ram?

its bloat either way, but compressed image with 40m package plus package running in ram is 40-50m when running if the image is copied compressed, while its 80m when running otherwise. and if its compressed when copied, the size in ram when its not running is basically the size of the package. not just being optimistic here-- ive run so much in 1.5g i really doubt the copy in ram is uncompressed. i use xz compression on squashfs ("linuxfs") images, same as puppy and likely refracta and debian and antix.

if the image was uncompressed, it should require at least 2.5g of ram, without having any left over for actually running anything (even the kernel.) so my cd image shouldnt be able to run toram on a 1.5g machine. it wouldnt fit-- and yet, i have no"official" facts about how it works, only the size compressed / the size uncompressed / the amount of ram used. its an enormous hint, id still like confirmation.

__{{emoticon}}__
I'm becoming senile?
As you've pointed out, toram just copies the rootfs container into a tmpfs.

And, the 8Mb, I guess anticapitalista's early post was explaining that compressed webkit lib, within the rootfs, occupies only 2Mb.