According to Distrowatch, there are eleven “distributions” “based” on Arch Linux. I use “distributions” in quotes, because some are far less of a distribution than others and “based” gets quotes because some are so based that they are really Arch Linux in a poor disguise…

I have seen a bunch of new release announcements for several of these distributions in the last few days, so I thought I would take some for a spin and see what I am missing out on.

All distributions were tested in VirtualBox with a 128GB disk and 2GB RAM.

Contender #1: Chakra – 2012.12 Claire

The Chakra Project is my #1 contender as it is a real Linux distribution. They do use our PKGBUILDs (sometimes too directly…) but they rebuild everything for themselves. Chakra also has quite an interesting take on the rolling release model, opting for a “stable” core of the distribution and rolling release userland. So toolchain updates are rare, but the newest KDE will be packaged within days. I have issues with their “stable” core, because stable means no updates at all. Even minor bug fix updates are not considered and I am sure there is no backporting of any security fixes either as their team is too small to handle that. For example, I would not be running pacman-4.0.2 or even an unpatched pacman-4.0.3 as my distributions package manager. Another thing unique to Chakra is the pure KDE set-up. Any popular software that is not Qt based (e.g. firefox, GIMP) is supplied in a bundle. I find these a very bad idea, as many of the same libraries are on your system multiple times but in separate bundles, and it also appears that these are easy to break and under-maintained.

Onto the installer… Chakra wins points for being the only pure graphical installer out of the distributions I consider here. I did a review of the installer early in 2010 and there seemed a complete lack of improvement. The Live DVD booted fine and welcomed me with a window that pointed out the difference between Chakra and Arch, and noted that pacman is not designed for a GUI frontend (debatable…) so it will be replaced one day. Starting the install gives three screens worth of install notes which no-one has ever read and if anyone did read them, I am confident they did not care that their website is being redesigned. The partitioning took me to an external tool (KDE Partition Manager), which I actually found rather difficult to use. It took me several attempts to get everything set so that the installer would let me continue.

Once I finished the install, I rebooted… to a prompt. Whatever autodetection is done to get the KDE session up a running post-install had failed in VirtualBox. So no further review was done.

Contender #2: CinnArch – 2012.12.21

I had heard good things about the Cinnamon desktop, so CinnArch was my next choice. This distribution is Arch Linux – when I look at the package information for glibc , I see that I packaged it. The only difference is that an additional repo is provided with the packages needed for Cinnamon desktop to run.

The installer boots to a nice live system. There is two installation options – “CLI installer” and “Graphical Installer” but the latter is not selectable so “CLI” it is… In this case, CLI means an ascii-graphical menu driven installation environment that was easy to follow. The only steps that I found amusing was finding the fastest mirror to install from, which (with only slight exaggeration) took longer to complete than downloading the packages from the slowest mirror would have. And then on with installing the packages. Or not… It turns out that the installer detects I am using VirtualBox and tries to install the virtualbox-guest-modules package, which currently has a broken dependency and so can not be installed. There is no way to skip this that I could find.

So lets play around in the live media to see what might have been. It turns out that CinnArch provides two repos: cinnarch-repo and cinnarch-core . I could not find the justification for requiring a second repo. The repo looks fairly good on a quick glance, with all packages signed and a keyring provided. Theoretically, you can just enable that repo and install cinnamon from there, but I could not find where to see a list of keys that the developers use that would enable me to install the keyring package and then verify the rest of the packages. One thing I was concerned about was the filesystem package that was being provided for reasons I could not ascertain. The biggest issue with providing a repo for Arch Linux is that you need to keep up with our rolling base. That means your repo needs to have rebuilds available when we push (e.g.) a library update with an soname change. Providing an unnecessary filesystem package seems to only make things difficult for them. This was also my first time seeing the Pacman-XG GUI for the pacman package manager. That is enough said about that…

Contender #3: Manjaro – 0.8.3 XFCE edition

I was not expecting much from Manjaro given I had read this review of a previous installer. But given the “success” of the last two distros, it has a chance… Some things from that review had not changed – in the live environment there is still the unnecessary password of “manjaro” for both the user and root. And I was not endured by the green colour scheme or the logo which is used for the “start” menu. But to give Manjaro credit, I successfully installed using the old style Arch ascii-graphical install, which was easy for those that are use to that. Reiser3 as the default filesystem still confuses me.

So what do you get from Manjaro? It seems to be Arch delayed plus extras. The idea is that the Arch repos are delayed reaching you for a few days while everything is sorted out to give you an easy upgrade. This happens by adding a package manjaro-system which is always upgraded first and runs a script that automatically handles any manual intervention that would be required on a pure Arch Linux system. As a heads up, this uses a feature of pacman called SyncFirst that is removed for the upcoming pacman-4.1 , so they may need to rethink their entire system soon.

The first difference I noted was it ran a 3.4.24 kernel, so that have held that back from being updated to the newest release, but at least it is the newest 3.4 series release. Looking at the glibc package once again, I am the packager, but it is a repo called [platform] . The Arch [extra] and [community] repos appear to be used as-is, so the need for [basis] , [platform] and [addon] repos to replace our small [core] repo is strange. Also, this was the first time I had ever heard of a GUI for pacman with the imaginative name pacman-gui . It allows you to run pacman -Sy , which just refreshes the databases – a crazy thing to do without immediately updating in a rolling release distribution that does not provide multiple versions of a library. And it is not much of a GUI either, as it just launches a terminal that runs the pacman command you just clicked. There was also a LibreOffice installer that called pacman in the background.

The Winner?

Sadly, I do not think there was any winners today. Chakra had the most polished live environment, but failed to boot to the desktop. CinnArch failed through no fault of its own, which is sort of a fault of its own for not being a real distribution. Manjaro installed, although I saw nothing to make me want to recommend it.

The may be the most painful statement I have ever made… but ArchBang might be the winner!

Edit: Twelve hours later and the bug on the Arch end preventing the CinnArch install has been fixed. CinnArch installed and booted to the desktop without an issue.