Ease of installation

Can you anchor them with ease?

This is another one of those parameters that really isn’t a factor when choosing one of these candidates. That’s because all the distributions on test here use the distribution-independant Calamares installer. Calamares is actually a framework that the distributions can customise as per their target users. The installer is pretty intuitive and visually appealing and gets the job done without too much fuss. Its partitioning feature supports both manual and automated partitioning tasks. It also includes a very convenient Replace Partition option that allows you to reuse a partition for hopping distributions. That said it’s best for simple straightforward installations and doesn’t yet support advanced setups like RAID and LVM partitions.

One obvious difference between the implementations of the Calamares installer across the distributions is purely cosmetic. The other difference is that some distributions give you the option to encrypt the root partition while others do not. The installer as implemented in Chakra, Maui and Netrunner falls under the latter category and doesn’t offer the option to encrypt a newly created partition. Conversely, Manjaro and KaOS do let you encrypt the partition in which you plan to install the respective distribution. KaOS developers have also tweaked Calamarest to better detect other installed operating systems and distributions and identify them during the partitioning stage.