The following idea arose from these three consecutive posts in the thread:
post44159.html#p44159
post44161.html#p44161
post44165.html#p44165
Together these present an opportunity for antiX to become more user friendly and attractive.

Main use cases for xvesa
There are probably two main cases

Case 1
The specific video driver, or version thereof, is available in the repo but not shipped within antiX. In this case the user will usually download and install the appropriate driver for the hardware. The newly installed video driver produces superior video performance and permanently replaces xvesa.

Case 2
The video hardware is no longer supported. antiX therefore ships without the driver and one is not available from the repo. In this case xvesa is the fall back option. It's inferior video performance is accepted and it remains installed permanently.


When a user evaluates whether to adopt antiX the video display is a major consideration.
In Case 1 it is of lesser importance as xvesa is used an interim measure
In Case 2 it is the only practicable way to use the system with antiX
In both cases it is desirable for the user to be able to switch to their preferred display resolution via the Control Center.


Current position
antiX does not set a colour depth value in xorg.conf. This lets xvesa default to using the highest height x width resolution that the highest colour value will support on the local hardware. This is often 24 bit, which is commonly supported even on many ancient systems.

The problem is that lots of older systems will only support 800x600 at 24 bit. This means they are tied to that as a maximum HxW resolution because of the antiX method of handling colour depth.


Suggested position
antiX should automatically set a colour depth value of 16 bit in xorg.conf when xvesa is being used.

Over many years I have yet to find video hardware that does not work at 16 bit. That is not to say there are none, just that the many I've seen do work. In lots of day-to-day operations, a display using 16 bit is almost indistinguishable from one using 24 bit.

Using 16 bit colour will also usually allow a range of display resolutions to be available via the Control Center.

16 bit colour seems a good choice for the default fall back setting for xvesa in antiX. It will also bring it into step with the default colour depth for the console used by antiX which is 16 bit.