Condres OS 19.09
puritanical Arch users may scoff at the prospect of their beloved distro being used to power ‘easy to use’ distros, featuring such fripperies as a nice installer and a working desktop out of the box.
Nevertheless, Arch-based distros are becoming more commonplace, as people seek to harness the power and fresh packages of this mighty distro. There were even enough for use to do a Roundup on them back in LXF246. One of the first such distros was the now-defunct Apricity, which featured a tidy take on the Gnome desktop, as well as a Cinnamon edition.
Condres OS is a relative newcomer to the Arch-based distro scene and comes from Italian team Codelinsoft. It’s available in a variety of flavours, and the one we’ve painstakingly etched onto our disc is dubbed Apricity Relives, in tribute to that departed distro.
So you’ll find a bold, stylish desktop theme with the Dash-to-dock extension providing a dock—a feature which to many, but apparently not to Gnome developers, is an essential desktop component. Condres bills itself as an OS for the cloud, and includes the Ice tool for managing Site Specific Browsers, in which your favourite web apps can be viewed. There’s also the Pushbullet tool for sharing files with other devices and receiving mobile notifications, plus
Syncthing for synchronising large files and directories across the net.
There’s a boatload of noteworthy small touches too. We liked the use of Zsh as the default shell, combined with the Powerline terminal prettifier. Then there’s the Stacer utility for checking resource usage and generally optimising your system. The Steam launcher is just waiting to distract you from all your cloudand work-type business, and Gufw lets you easily protect yourself with a firewall without referring to the back of that envelope where you keep your notes on the Iptables syntax.
Of course you get all the benefits of Arch Linux too: brand new packages, access to the AUR, the right to look down on Ubuntu users (joke). If you don’t like Gnome, Condres is available in KDE, MATE, Xfce, Cinnamon and other editions. There’s even a special version for those poor souls with 64-bit systems but a 32-bit EFI. There’s a 32-bit version too (which uses the community-maintained Arch32 repos), but you’ll have to download that yourself.