Review: Archman GNU/Linux 2020-11-12 "KDE"



For the most part my time with Archman was fairly typical of using a modern distribution. The installation went smoothly, the usual, popular open source applications were available, desktop performance was good on the workstation and about average, at least once I had tweaked settings, in the virtual machine. Most applications and settings worked the way I wanted and I generally could just focus on getting stuff done without worrying about the underlying operating system.
However, there were a number of curious choices and obvious bugs in this release. As I mentioned early on, booting in UEFI mode is a challenge because starting the live desktop is not the default option in the boot menu. There are some little quirks with settings, or the location of some items, but most of them are fine. The big issues for me were to do with package management. I'm very puzzled by Discover being the default package manager when it has no back-end, preventing it from functioning at all. The second package manager wasn't much better since its default view provides access to only one package and dependency resolution seems to be broken. Working with software on the command line works fine so this does not appear to be a problem with Archman as a whole, just the graphical front-end for package management.
In the end I got along okay with Archman. The distribution did not, in my opinion, do anything remarkably well or stand out from other Arch-based distributions in any way that grabbed my attention. It's a mostly solid operating system with a few notable issues that I could work around. I think the biggest issue most people will likely face is each snapshot offers different editions. Which means if you want, for example, the MATE flavour, you will end up downloading an old snapshot and then installing a lot of updates to bring the system up to date. Otherwise Archman provided a mostly good, occasionally puzzling, but on the whole uneventful experience.
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