Antergos, the successor to Cinnarch, has been announced and the first release made of the new Arch-Linux-based distribution. The name Antergos comes from "a galician word to link the past with the present".

In just a month since the last release of Cinnarch, during which the developers decided to drop Cinnamon for GNOME, they have produced a new release that brings a distribution that is more desktop agnostic than ever before. Cinnarch development was halted after the developers were finding it harder to synchronise the Cinnamon development with the rolling nature of Arch Linux.



Antergos offers Live CD or two installation to hard disk options. The Antergos live CD starts up using GNOME 3 as its desktop and offers the user the chance to try out the operating system as is or to install to hard disk using either a command line or its own Cnchi GUI installer. It also includes the PacmanXG installer which, as Antergos is fully compatible with Arch, gives access to Arch Linux's repositories for packages.

When installing Antergos, the Cnchi graphical installer allows the user to select between GNOME, Cinnamon, Xfce and Razor-qt desktop environments and promises to choose an appropriate selection of the best suited applications for each environment. GNOME 3.8.1 is the default choice on Antergos's first release, 2013.05.12.

Antergos runs GNOME 3.8 by default. Note the few icons in the launcher.

The inclusion of Razor-qt is said to be an experiment and, at the moment, it will also install KDE as the developers are still working out which Qt packages they need to use; currently it uses KWin and KDM too rather than Razor-qt's preferred configuration.

There are 32-bit and 64-bit ISO images available to download or torrent and the release announcement includes instructions for Cinnarch users on how to adjust their systems to migrate to Antergos.

(djwm)