Back to the Lost Arch
Ubuntu is dropping Unity after years of developments, turning away from a phone & convergence strategy that eventually seemed to failed catching the community and the investors interests… Canonical has faced a difficult choice, let’s hope everything works fine now.
In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation. And industry has not rallied to the possibility, instead taking a ‘better the devil you know’ approach to those form factors, or investing in home-grown platforms.
Their attempt to grab a piece of the phone OS market was seducing though, and I was quite fond of the last Ubuntu releases.
So, while they’re busy re-building their strategy and refocusing their efforts on a smooth Gnome integration, lets have a look to a more “power user” Linux distribution: ArchLinux.
I may be used to Linux environments, but I’m still not a total expert on manually installing each element of a distro using command lines. For this reason, I won’t install an Arch from scratch yet, but rather use the second most popular ArchLinux graphical installer: Antergos. I may get back to the first one, Manjaro, later. And finish another time by Arch-Anywhere.
Antergos - originally started under the name Cinnarch - is a graphical installer for the ArchLinux rolling-release distribution: the system, from the base OS components to the applications installed, receive updates as they are released upstream.
Just install and run.
It’s simple as that.
- Get the iso on https://antergos.com/try-it/
- Follow the installer (cnchi), chose your desktop environment
- If an error occurs during the installation process, begin by updating cnchi by killing it (if running) then typing the command:
cnchi-dev
I went for the Gnome DE, that comes with a nice Numix GTK, Shell and icones theme. Fonts may need some reworks, but the DE is globally ready to use.
And of course the AUR can be accessed by Yaourt, if you need to install additional packages.
In the end, mission accomplished for Antergos: Arch has an easy-to-use graphical installer, that comes with a polished Gnome customization and the classic panel of softwares to start working. A great first contact for an new ArchLinux user.
