Arcolinux 19.06
There’s an endless list of Arch-based distros, but there’s something about this one that catches Mayank Sharma’s fancy.
There’s an endless list of Arch-based distros and people online to go on about them, but there’s something about this one that catches Mayank Sharma’s fancy.
While a project’s website doesn’t have any bearing on the distro, it has to be inviting enough to appeal to new users. Arcolinux has an oddly designed website that doesn’t immediately make the project’s noble intentions clear. Once you understand the project’s objectives, you’ll realise that its main website, along with a couple of others, are part of the learning process and are supposed to be navigated in a particular order as you level up your Arch experience.
Arcolinux is really an educational system that you can also use as a very capable regular desktop. Of the project’s three releases, the main one comes with three desktop environments, is chock-full of productivity apps and is designed for the average desktop user. Then there’s the minimalist Arcolinuxd release, which ships with just enough components to help you build your own custom Arcolinux installation. The third edition is called Arcolinuxb and enables you to modify the stock Arcolinux ISO to build your own custom image. The project hosts a string of such customised ISOS as contributed by its community.
The project’s namesake release is the one we’re reviewing here. The ISO weighs in at 2GB, which is a self-imposed ceiling by the developers. The Live environment boots into a customised Xfce desktop. The
Calamares installer comes up right after boot, but you can safely exit it to experience the distribution before you anchor it to your disk.
One of the best things about Arco is that virtually all aspects of the distro have been tweaked by the developers. The customised desktop looks inviting, with its attractive icon theme and the Plank dock. In terms of apps, besides the main Arch repository the distro pulls in some from the Arch User Repository (AUR) as well and between them has a well-stocked installation.
That said, we aren’t really fond of its app selection. Virtually all classes of apps have multiple options, including multiple browsers, several IDES and advanced text editors. Using an unregistered copy of the proprietary Sublime Text as the default text editor also doesn’t make sense. Thanks to all this duplicity, the developers couldn’t find room to fit in an office suite without going over the 2GB limit.
In terms of usability, the distro is like any other Archbased desktop. You can access Arch’s apps universe via the graphical Pamac package manager, or the venerable
pacman command-line tool. Unlike its peers though, Arco includes several configuration options in the Xfce Settings
panel to help you further customise the desktop. You get loads of options to personalise various aspects of your installation’s appearance with custom themes and icons. There’s the kvantum manager to switch app themes,
conkyzen to apply all kinds of Conky applets on the desktop, and some small but useful scripts like the Fix Hardcoded Icons script, which applies the current theme to app icons that don’t adhere to the theme by default. The distro also includes a customised .bashrc with a handful of useful aliases.
The developers have also spent a considerable amount of time building documentation around the project that will not only help get things done in Arcolinux but also closer to installing and using the upstream Arch installation. Treating the Arcolinux project like any other distro wouldn’t be fair since there’s more to it than just the distro. The main objective of the Arcolinux release on review here is just to give a taste of the things that can be done with Arch Linux. While it is fully usable, the aim of the project is just to use it as a stepping stone on your way to Arch Linux mastery.