Anarchy Linux 1.0.0
With this version number, you’d think that this is a new distro… and you would be right, sort of. There was a distro called Arch Anywhere, but it fell foul of a trademark claim, so it’s been reborn as Anarchy.
The original title gives an indication of Anarchy’s heredity; it’s a derivative of Arch Linux. This may be the point that some of you are backing away, thinking Arch is a scary distro. It’s not, but it does require a certain amount of expertise, or at least the patience to read the documentation carefully. But this is not Arch Linux. Anarchy may be based on Arch, but it’s aimed at a different user group than the intermediate-to-power users of Arch. This is a distro that just works without you having to read lots of documentation. Much of the fiddly work is taken care of by the installer, making this a good distro for inexperienced Linux users, even if it doesn’t go to the hand-holding extremes of some of the particularly newbie-oriented distros.
Installing is also a fairly simple task. It’s not as simple as with some distros but still quite simple. The installer is a text-based affair, running in an xterm window, so that part is keyboard only − the usual Space to select, Tab to move between buttons and Enter to confirm applies. Installation requires an Internet connection (there doesn’t appear to be an option for an offline install) and it will download quite a lot of data, depending on the desktop and extra packages you choose. This does mean, however, that it installs the latest version of all packages. So you won’t get hit with a slew of updates as soon as you boot, which is often the case with most distros.
If you want to keep the downloads to a minimum during installation, select the XFCE desktop and don’t add any extra packages. You can always add software later, once the installed system is running. The installer enables you to create a user, apart from root. Make sure you take this as running a desktop as root is a security risk.