Yes, that was quite impressive by Rolfie Now, you can remove multimedia repo from POS but I guess you still may run into problems because of stuff from there already present when you install. Anyway on this machine it has the same issue as Devuan: if you disable nouveau X does not start at all.
You may well ask why repos not work, it actually threw an error i have never seen before, it actually said 'no access' - and this happened repeatedly over a couple days. I'm guessing it must still have been some temporary hiccup. Ok, I tried the smaller iso images just for fun and because most of the available usb drives I have here are 1 gb SD cards. Minimal live: no gui, X did not start. is this by design? There were some errors and the installation failed. Must say I find the refracta installer quite horrible, both gui and cli version. Tried the Debian installer iso, that gave an installation that gave a kernel panic trying to boot. The live iso with GUI refracta installer gave an installer that did not boot into X. This machine, an MSI Katana gaming laptop seems a bit difficult for this distro with its dual video card setup (rtx 1650 mobile and integrated intel video). If neither nvidia or nouveau work it should still start X with the intel video but that does not work (nouveau gives glitches with the card so I blacklist it). Ok, I ended up with Salix 15 (i.e Slackware but with gui tools, this also uses SysVinit). Nvidia did not install (salix uses the installer from nvidia), nouveau got uninstalled and this is able to use the intel video which works fine. I have a Devuan install on an old desktop, a gaming tower from around 2008 that I got used. No problems there. So thanks, see you later.

I used the setup that came with the installation, no tinkering. Peppermint is very neatly set up so I did not think something like that could be missing. Also in my experience it is a bad idea to leave debian multimedia or backports repo activated, this will lead to system instability. I prefer to activate them, install what I want and deactivate. So I tried first to use the system without the multimedia repo - and ruined that installation trying to purge all nvidia and nouveau packages after it turned out to be difficult to get rid of them - the nvidia standalone installer kept compaining
Peppermint Devuan has a 6.1 kernel - is that the same as stock Devuan?

BTW I successfully upgraded a (non-production of course) antiX 18 installation to Beowulf.
There were only some minor problems. As I needed a 'daily driver' it got replaced with Artix OpenRC Xfce.

Seems playing around with openrc is best done in Artix. Just tried it on my laptop and their setup is really good. Networkmanager apparently runs with no problems f.ex (have not tried it yet as the live cd comes with Conman) Somewhat less bleeding edge than Arch itself - they say because their server fills up - maybe a joke

Correct, not supported.
This seems to be because Debian has made some changes that made it more difficult to use another init than systemd.

My system was MX-18, not antiX. Of course a dist-upgrade to a different distro is not supported. But upgrading to Beowulf may be less problematic than dist-upgrading to 19.

I did get a number of issues but they were fixable.

Tried fsck and it said the same: recovering journal, fs clean.

So i guess what I need is the correct shutdown code for the terminal that will spell out for the system to shut down the fs correctly?

PATH is still messed up, most commands don't work in console.
The export path command only fixes it until next reboot. Well, I can find workarounds for the few things I need the console for.

Other than that the installation is very stable and stuff works.

Sorry This installation is a bit weird. Now it refuses to run Synaptic, says command not found in terminal.. I'll get it sorted. Sheesh .. now music files are playing double speed..  Not boring anyway

Wvdial is a very effective tool and in fact easy to use. The antiX devs made a config file generator for it that works fine - my config file I think I just copied from the net.
The reason I use it is that Networkmanager/nm-applet stopped working with my Huawei 4g modem (it worked for several years without problems).
Then there are not so many options. Getting hold of the files manually is not hard at all just a hassle. Debian Jessie versions ought to work without modification.