Archman 2019.09
There’s hardly an issue when Mayank Sharma doesn’t run into an Arch-based desktop distribution. Does this offer any benefits over others? FREE | HTTP://ARCHMAN.ORG/E
Developed by a mature but nonEnglish speaking team of Arch specialists, this distro has a couple of things that aren’t particularly obvious. For starters, the project seem to support multiple desktop environments, but their latest release on test here is only available with the Xfce desktop. On that front, Archman 2019.09 includes the latest Xfce 4.14 edition that includes four years’ worth of improvements and polish.
Archman’s desktop includes the standard desktop furniture. There’s the centralised Xfce panel at the bottom, which features the Whisper Applications menu and the standard fare of icons including a workspace switcher, a clock and a notifications area. Interestingly, besides icons for the home folder and trash, the desktop has one for the HexChat IRC client. This seems strange, since an IRC client isn’t considered as an often-used app on a regular desktop distro.
It’s not that the distro is short of apps. The default Archman install contains all the usual desktop productivity apps such as Firefox, LibreOffice and GIMP, besides a good collection of nifty little utilities. Some of the offbeat apps it bundles include the uGet downloader, the Parole media player, the Quod Libet audio player and the Ex Falso audiotag editor. The distro relies on the Calamares installer to help you anchor it to your disks. It gives you the option to create a small swap partition or a larger one that can house the current environment, that comes in handy when you put the computer to sleep.
SAME OL’, SAME OL’
One of the ways distros distinguish themselves from their peers is with their custom apps. Archman doesn’t give much to write home about on this front. It does include its Archman Settings Manager that you can use for some basic administration tasks. But this app has been forked from the Manjaro Settings Manager and instead of adding to it, Archman has removed one of its most useful modules. Gone is the Kernel module, one of the highlights of the tool in Manjaro, which enables inexperienced users to switch to a different kernel with a single click.
Besides the Settings Manager, Archman’s GitLab page also hosts several other custom projects, but these aren’t included in the distro. For instance, there’s a WhatsApp client that would have garnered some extra points for the distro had it been included in the distro’s official software repositories, at least.
Instead you’ll only find artwork, configuration and a handful of hardware drivers in Archman’s custom repository. The project’s website takes pride in the fact that the distro is a “pure” Arch offering with only some optimisations. It doesn’t detail nor quantify these improvements, but for what it’s worth
Archman performs incredibly well running inside a virtual machine even with limited resources.
On the face of it there’s nothing wrong with the distro; Archman is an Arch-based desktop that runs a slightly customised Xfce desktop and ships with all the usual productivity apps. But this straightforwardness is also its weakness. Archman offers little else besides the convenience of a ready-touse, Arch-based, Xfce-sporting desktop. The distro brings very little to the table, especially when you pit it against its much mature Arch-based peers. It pales compared to our favourite Arch-based distro Manjaro, which has set quite a high benchmark for usability. Manjaro also has a vibrant and active community, flush with documentation to handhold new users, which you wouldn’t find in Archman. Also, while we were impressed by Archman’s performance, lightweight Arch derivatives like ArchLabs do a much better job.
“The distro brings very little to the table, especially when you pit it against its much mature Arch-based peers”.