I am not what one would call a huge fan of Arch Linux or its derivatives. My past experiences have all been pretty poor so really, the bar is set quite low. I don’t expect much from an Arch based distro. This is not to say that it is bad or anyone shouldn’t run it but rather, I should not run Arch as I lack the discipline to properly maintain an Arch system. I also think pacman has incredibly terrible syntax which makes no logical sense. I’m sure it does for some or justifications have been created to support the idea that it could be logical but it is truly not straight forward and you will never be able to sell me on the idea that it is. That said, Archcraft was a rather enjoyable experience for me. I think the main reason is that it was configured with a minimalist, low system spec, in mind whilst also providing you with the latest open source offerings.
There are some other unique offerings that Archcraft developer provides and that is they will make custom, purpose built ISOs for whatever purposes for a fee. This is of great benefit because I can see a use case where you may want something specific built for a series of machines or appliances that could benefit from a simple installation method. It basically outsources that particular process to someone who has made themselves an expert in that function.
I am going to keep Archcraft around. Spin it up, do the updates and see how well this continues to work.
I found that since I really don’t care for using the AUR or anything that requires me to do anything with pacman, I did just enough to install Flatpak and added applications directly from Flathub. I realize that, in a way, this is an action that is in contrast to the minimalist philosophy of the distro itself but a lean, mean core leaves room for the containerized Flatpak ecosystem to run with little or no interference. I see it as a great union of ideas.
But what do you think of Archcraft? I would like to know. Leave a comment on this post or for further discussion about Archcraft can be had here on the TuxDigital forum
https://forum.tuxdigital.com/t/linux-saloon-25-mar-2023-archcraft-linux/5741
Linux truly does put personal back into personal computers. These various distributions that answers in various ways how it can be done is fantastic and gets you thinking.
References
https://archcraft.io/
Linux Saloon
Archcraft discussion on the TuxDigital forum
The thing with AUR is that it is super convenient and light. It typically downloads the package from the creator of a program.. like on GitLab and similar. So unless the creator botch their own package/program it will work good. People usually don’t release programs that do not work. So my experience is that it is super stable. PKGBUILDS also makes it simple if you want to tune a program with patches e.t.c.. It takes like 5 min to make a package to maintain. You just git push the changes to AUR. I have pretty much been on the same install since 2016 and it just rolls on. There is a program called ‘downgrader’ which let you install whatever version you like.
For me Arch has been stabler and more convenient than Ubuntu/Fedora/OpenSuse e.t.c.. as the other have forced me to reinstall when stuff have broken. That is not the case with Arch.
Installing Flatpak to me is a bit overkill. It is like installing one distro to run inside your distro. With libraries e.t.c.. that risk lack security updates and so on. The upside is that distros that previously didn’t have as much packages, now do. This has never been an issue on Arch though. So I like the idea of it… even though it has some shortcomings.