Antergos caught my attention because it claims to be the easiest and fastest way to get an Arch Linux machine up and running. So I gave it a try and right now, it's my main OS (because I did something stupid and my Fedora install b0rked...and just as I was beginning to like Fedora...). I don't consider this a review per se, but here's my experience with Antergos since I installed it last Feb 20, 2014.
If you've installed Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other related distributions, then installation is a no-brainer. The way I installed Antergos was to boot off of a USB and enter into the Live Session. From there, the Cnchi will take care of the installation process.
There is a section in the installation process that asks which desktop environment you'd like to install. At the time I installed it, the choices were Base, Cinnamon, Gnome, Openbox, Razor-qt and Xfce.
Since rediscovering Gnome 3, I went with that desktop environment. I also used Antergos with Cinnamon for the family PC here at the house and so far it's been working fine. I don't know why there's no love for LXDE, which is in my top 3 GUIs for Linux, but I think it's easily installable via the pacman package manager. XFCE is one of the more famous desktop environments around and Razor-Qt is what I would call a watered down version of KDE; speaking of KDE, it wasn't in the desktop options either. MATE was also missing from the choices, but maybe future installation media will have these already. Anyway, Gnome 3 was what the Antergos developers said to be the recommended desktop environment so I went with that.
Cnchi also has a step for feature selection where you can choose to include some useful packages during the OS installation.
The Antergos Wiki entry for installing will guide you through the installation process flawlessly. But do take note of the entry below the slide show, Installing Antergos using a BIOS-GPT configuration, if you plan on using a GPT partion scheme with a BIOS enabled motherboard. I have a motherboard capable of using UEFI but I didn't bother trying to get Antergos running with UEFI.
Wheter if You want or need to use a GPT partitioned disk under a BIOS system, the GRUB (which is the boot loader) needs a BIOS boot partition. Unfortunately, cnchi is uncapable of doing that task yet. To make the system boot, You'll need to use GParted which comes already in the live image of Antergos. After opening GParted create a partition of at least 1 MB without a File System, secondly, right click the partition, chose "Manage flags" and finally, select the bios_grub option. After doing this you can continue with the installation normally.
Installation time depends on your connection speed as Antergos downloads everything from the repos during installation. My install went for around an hour. Once installation completes, you will be asked to reboot.
Congratualtions, you now have a running Arch Linux machine complete with GUI without the hassle of spending at least 2 hours reading the Arch Wiki Beginner's Guide [1].
My current setup is a desktop PC powered by an AMD Trinity A10-5800K CPU using a D-Link DWA-125 wireless USB adapter. So far, I’ve had no problems with these or any other hardware currently on my system.
I've been using Antergos as my main OS for close to a month as of this posting and no critical issues have been encountered.
Ever since using Gnome 3 on my previous Fedora 20 setup, I've changed my mind about it. I used to hate it, but I really didn't understand why I did. So far, Gnome has been working well for me.
Perhaps the minimalist approach of Gnome 3 to the desktop is what appeals to me. So far, I like Gnome 3.
Antergos comes with some applications already installed, as opposed to vanilla Arch where you need to manually install every application you intend to use yourself. There's the web browser Chromium, a text editor gedit, a multimedia player Xnoise, a photo manager Shotwell, Cheese for the web camera, a bit torrent client Transmission, and, if it was selected during installation, the LibreOffice office suite.
I would have preferred Firefox over Chromium but that is easily remedied with a package installation.
If "Proprietary Software" was enabled during the OS installation, Flash content playback is not an issue.
But personally, in my case, I opted not to install the Flash plugin and chose to go with the HTML5 player. There will be some sites that aren't very HTML5 friendly, but my video consumption is primarily on YouTube so no big issues for me; you'd be surprised how many videos uploaded to YouTube are HTML5 compliant.
Again, if the "Proprietary Software" was enabled during the OS installation, then everything should play in Xnoise. Here's a GIF of a sample movie being played.
Music playback is also okay in Xnoise.
But Xnoise doesn't have the system tray integration most music players have i.e. when a mouse-over is done on the player's icon in the system tray, a pop-up window shows playback controls. You need to right-click on the icon to get a very simple playback control pop-up.
An option to install LibreOffice is provided when Antergos is installed. So if that was enabled during OS installation, then it's the office suite for your system. It can also be installed after the OS is installed using the LibreOffice Installer shortcut.
Antergos is compatible with the Arch Linux repositories so anything from said repos may be installed to Antergos using the pacman package manager.
There is an experimental (beta) GUI package manager called PacmanXG to handle software installation but I haven't explored it as I prefer the command line way of installing stuff. Note that this is not only for Antergos, but also for Arch Linux and other derivatives like Manjaro and Chakra. It's a bit cluttered for my taste and I think it's done using the Qt too, evident in the window controls, which feels a bit out of place on a Gnome desktop [2].
There are no critical issues to rant about at the time of this posting.
I did have errors on boot regarding the "Failed to start Remount Root & Kernel File Systems". It was apparently an issue with the /etc/fstab entry that the installer used for the btrfs file system mount options. I think that the developers will take a look at this since I posted the error in the Antergos forums.
I also got errors regarding the backlight for eeepc-wmi setting, which apparently occurs with any computer using an ASUS motherboard. This was an issue with systemd version 210 and upgrading to 211 solves this.
- -0.5 for the error generated by the /etc/fstab entry for a btrfs file system
As always, thanks for reading. Happy Linuxing!
PacmanXG was pretty horrible. I'd recommend Octopi or Pamac.
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