ANTERGOS 18.12 KDE REVIEW AND A BRIEF TALE OF MY EXPERIENCES WITH KDE IN GENERAL

Antergos, a Spanish produced, Arch-based, Unix-Like operating system, is a modern marvel to say the least, when compared to Ubuntu, Debian, Manjaro, etc. Antergos works similarly to a standard build of Arch in that it doesn’t really offer many bells and whistles itself, whereas Manjaro uses its own repos, and seems self aware of what it is doing in the way it manages SSDs and partitioning schemes. Antergos is a more bare-bones system, which is not to say it doesn’t add something over vanilla Arch, but it does so in a way that doesn’t get in the way of the user, doesn’t effect the user’s ability to use the operating system in any way. As I previously mentioned, partitioning is different between Antergos and other Arch-based distros like Manjaro in that Antergos pays close attention to detail whilst installing. It creates a separate root and boot partitioning schema on the drive with swap taking the rest. It seems to use a more logical and advanced method that I can only assume comes from a different piece of software in the background(Manjaro seems to use Fdisk?). When observing the finished product with Parted and other tools, the difference is easy to see. With Antergos, there are fewer chances of partitions being placed outside of boundaries or being misaligned so there is thus, fewer writes for each cycle being used. Antergos also has a modern look and feel when booted. Antergos in general is much more bare in terms of installed applications, however, it makes it easy to install others with the pamac package manager. KDE itself has fewer widgets and less to customize, but both run really well. KDE is a favorite of mine because it can be customized within inches of look and feel of Windows 10. KDE has had its own issues in the past, even past versions were riddled with bugs, however, Plasma5 as a desktop is an improvement and it’s kinda growing on me. Antergos KDE has a more purist KDE approach as it include way more KDE apps than does Manjaro or possibly even Kubuntu. Antergos uses an Arch kernel which is also used within Manjaro, however, Manjaro often tweaks or adds/subtracts from it. The kernel is a Monolithic kernel much like other Linux distros use, however, Arch is usually a few steps ahead of everyone else, which leads into my next point; Arch is ahead of everyone else, this also means that there may be bugs or issues with running bleeding-edge software. I recently installed a few days ago and have yet to see any issues, however, running Arch, it is inevitable that you may need a backup, especially when it is the only os you have or you are keeping family photos on your only hard drive. I installed Antergos on a Crucial MX500 250GB SSD(review will come later.) so I’m not really using this for mass storage, but I am keeping my eye on some things. I also noticed that with Arch-based systems, usually the installer turns TRIM on by default and sets it to run all the time with the “discard” option. Discard is a mounting parameter which tells the kernel to force trim to be ran after every erase cycle. This is nice in that it helps reclaim space for future files, however, in Linux specifically, this is probably more of a hinder than anything as it forces the drive to be in use longer, thus taking a toll on system resources and power consumption. I usually disable that feature in fstab. Antergos is a rolling release so it should never need reinstallation, barring the usual issues with bleeding-edge bugs of course. Antergos has the ability to use the AUR, however, no Arch-based installations I’ve used ever seem to come with this enabled by default. One more thing to mention, the theming and icon themes do seem to be a bit out of whack in some situations on KDE, never noticed it in XFCE, but gtk seems to be still on gtk2, which might not even be that bad as kde native apps seem to theme well. Icons seem to not mesh well with KDE in this build yet for some reason, however; Papirus, Breeze, Breath and Obsidian all seem to work well enough for Icons, with the Breeze-gtk-theme working pretty well for everything else. All in all, I’d give this distribution five stars for efficiency and ease of use.