A few months ago, I don't remember when, a meme circulated the Internet that said "Jenna Ortega had to go through" X experience to prepare to play Wednesday, from the Addams family. The fun was in adding a harsh experience that made the attractive young actress gloomy. One of the hard experiences that she had to go through, according to the memes, was installing Arch Linux without using any script, all manual.
And it is that Arch Linux is not the easiest distro to install. It gets to such a point that some of its users boast of using Arch Linux and are not amused that it exists. archinstall, they say that if you need something like that choose another option. Well, like the day I wrote the article about "Go back to Windows"Not all bad-sounding advice is bad, and there are Arch-based options that have a graphical installer. Here is a list with the 5 best options.
Top 5 Arch Based Distros With Installer
EndeavourOS: Arch Linux with installer
Right now, one of the best options for those who want to use Arch Linux and not die trying is EndeavourOS. It is the successor to AntergOS, and it has just turned 4 years old. use the installer Squid, and in the process allows us to choose some packages, such as including an LTS kernel or different graphical environments. It uses Xfce by default.
EndeavorOS features special hardware support, among which we find NVIDIA drivers and ARM images. On the other hand, the community is active, so it is relatively easy to find documentation to solve any problem that we may encounter. For many, it offers the closest experience to using Arch Linux if it had a graphical interface installer.
ArcoLinux: good experience with different sizes
ArcoLinux is another good option that comes with a graphical environment pre-installed, but it is different from other distros. It offers options like the XL, which includes everything in the project; the XS, which is a "minimal" type variant; the D that does not have a desk and others with a different kernel, among which we find, for example, the ZEN. The default graphical environment is also Xfce.
Garuda Linux: Arch Linux for gamers
Garuda Linux is an Arch-based distro designed for gamers. It allows us to use practically any graphical environment or window manager, and by default it uses BTRFS as the file system, which improves performance. BTRFS is for some the successor to EXT4, not so much because of its similarities, but because it is what will end up being used in the future. Whether or not it is fulfilled is something that we will have to see over time.
As a distro for gaming, it has options such as support for Steam and Lutris with GameMode and Gamemode-Tools. The design after the installation of scratch, at least the dragon edition of KDE, is very attractive.
But Garuda isn't just for gamers; it simply has an issue for them. It has a normal edition that has an assistant from which we can install all kinds of software, kernels and others. It is a young system, but very complete.
GarudaLinux. Image, Garuda official website.
Archcraft: Do you like minimal installations?
Archcraft is a very Minimalist and light that can work with less than 500Mb of memory, thanks to the light applications. It provides bspwm, LXDE, Openbox and Xfce as desktops and also has built-in AUR support. The desktop it uses by default is Openbox, which is halfway between a window manager and a desktop to use.
Manjaro: management with graphical tools and more
Closes the Manjaro list, about which it is said a lot that "Manjaro is not Arch". It's not Arch because has its own philosophy, but the base is the same. Manjaro Stable is what we get after installing from scratch, but you can change the branch to the Testing and Unstable options, the latter being closer to Arch.
Among its strengths is Pamac, its own tool to install software which is in CLI (command line) and GUI (graphical interface) version. Another proprietary software is Manjaro Settings, from where users and language packs can be managed, but the best thing about this configuration tool is that it allows us to choose any kernel, whether it is mainline, LTS, RC or real-time, and also install open source or proprietary drivers.
Other distros based on Arch Linux, special mentions
Based on Manjaro there is Mabox (related article), a sort of community edit, but unrelated to the project. There is also BlackArch, which is the Arch-based distro for ethical hacking. It is worth a mention, but it is not the best option for less expert users.
Do you think there is an Arch Linux-based distro worth mentioning in this article?
Interesting list, the vast majority are the best known, which is not bad.
I would add CachyOS, it allows GUI installation and I think it brings something interesting, such as its repo compiled for the x86-64-v3 instruction set, as well as with LTO, both in the kernel and in other packages, to optimize the process, being, if I'm not mistaken, one of the most optimal options being binary distros and not source.
Personally, Garuda and CachyOS are always live on my USB, along with Arch, because they are always reliable and can be of use to me.
A greeting.