Antergos: An Easy, Quick Way To Try Out Arch Linux

I decided to give Antergos a whirl to see how this Arch Linux variant works. For those pressed for time or looking at an easy path for setting up an Arch Linux installation, Antergos seems to get the job done well.

Arch Linux fans are frequently requesting more benchmarks of their preferred Linux distribution at Phoronix over claims that it's faster than the likes of Ubuntu, more versatile, etc. Every once in a while I do deliver benchmarks of Arch but it's not too frequent given that it's a rolling-release distribution that's very open to end-user tweaking and modification, thus hard to give a defined reference point for other users to compare their results against ours, as opposed to just say "download XYZ ISO, install, and then benchmark!" Thus when benchmarking a distribution like Gentoo or Arch, I prefer using one of the derivatives that at least deploys out of the box quickly, gives some sane default values to use for benchmarking, etc.

Generally I have sided with Manjaro for easy and straightforward Arch Linux benchmarks, but given a lot of Phoronix readers lately bringing up Antergos, I decided to run some tests... In an article in the next few days will be the results of comparing Antergos against Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Fedora 20, but just wanted to share a few words now about this distribution formerly known as Cinnarch.

The Antergos ISO release from mid-June quickly booted up on one of the ultrabooks I brought along to Russia -- for this initial testing it's just limited to the systems I have on hand but next month when in the new office I'll be able to run a larger Linux comparison. The GNOME 3 stack currently makes up the default desktop environment of this Arch derivative, but other desktops are easily available.

Antergos' graphical installer is super simple and easy to use... Basically just like Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer.

The graphical installer also allows enabling support for Arch's User Repository (AUR) and utilizes Pacman for its default package manager and other close lineage to upstream Arch.

While the Antergos graphical installer is easy to use, for this SSD-based ultrabook when it came time to performing the actual installation it would always produce an error. After multiple reboots and trying to toggle different settings, the Antergos Installer would produce an error while creating partitions and their file-systems.