Linux distribution
Daring Nate Drake takes a trip in the Archcraft and finds it flies at the speed of light.
Arch Linux is well known for being a lightweight distro, but since 2021, developer Aditya Shakya has taken it a step further with his own derivative creation, Archcraft.
This distro keeps itself speedy by eschewing the traditional desktop environment in favour of window managers – Openbox for stacking and bspwm for tiling.
Archcraft also supports a number of Wayland compositors such as Sway and Wayfire. These can be installed manually, but the main website also offers a premium version of the OS, Archcraft Prime. You can use Archc This comes with the premium launch the Calama version of the Openbox, i3 and bspwm window managers, as well as the Sway, Wayfire, River, Hyprland and Newm Wayland compositors preinstalled. A minimum ‘donation’ of $55.55 is required. We’re focusing on the community edition, but you can read more and download the Prime version at https://ko-fi.com/s/c925a2a8c1.
Like Arch, Archcraft OS follows a rolling release model. The latest version (2024.04.06) has a number of updates for both packages and window managers.
We were keen to try Archcraft in a live environment, so proceeded to download the modestly sized Live ISO. Website visitors have the choice of direct download via Sourceforge, Google Drive or Mega. We were surprised not to see a BitTorrent option but persevered.
On first launch, we noted that Archcraft uses the GRUB2 bootloader. This has received some attention in the latest release, which now ensures that GRUB is installed on every update.
We were also delighted to see that the desktop loaded within seconds, launching a helpful welcome guide. This is where we learned that Archcraft uses the intuitive Calamares installer for setup. According to the release notes, it has been updated to the latest version.
Alternatively, you can deploy a secondary installer, ABIF, though as this is command-lined based, the official wiki advises it’s not for beginners.
Links to the wiki are available by choosing Get Started in the welcome guide. You can al
