I shared this above, but from my perspective, not a lot. Other than the mesh of meta packages it installed which makes it a bit hard to remove things, I didn’t see anything bad about it. It seemed like any-other Arch-based distro in my very limited testing. I also didn’t stumble across anything that made it interesting/different/special. Before there was lots of Arch-based distros out there, it would have been great to have a something like that but now with so many to choose from it is harder to stand apart from the crowd.
Ooh…there is one I haven’t tried yet. I will definitely have to check that out.
For anyone trying this, just a heads up that there seems to be bug in all their ISOs. You can’t boot the default option in UEFI mode. There is an error in the entry file.
You can either choose one of the other options or legacy boot it. I chose the nvidia option even though I am not running on nvidia and it booted fine.
I tend to wait until there are enough of them to bother with - which isn’t very long! I don’t run a notifier as such, I just have a continual scrolling display of what’s in the queue and counts of pkgs and AUR pkgs that I can look at anytime! Maybe I find something interesting to check out, or the count gets larger or…
For those less ‘committed’ (or in need of a different kind of commitment) I also have a couple of bash functions for a list of current counts or pkgs (search for ‘bash functions’ on forum) that display ‘on demand’. Nope - no obsession
It uses an offline Calamares that allows extra package selection. If you use the “expert” installer it allows quite a lot of package selection.
It is an opinionated distro for sure. It comes with a moderate amount of pre-installed software but the selections are fairly atypical and likely represent the creators personal choices. For me, I would spend a lot of time removing packages and auto-starting applications.
I tried both plasma and xfce. They both had customized layouts which were generally attractive. One of the nicer looking xfce layouts I have seen.
There are 3 custom repos which are positioned at the top to override the Arch repos.
They seem to repackaging *-bin packages from the AUR which always makes me uncomfortable.
After a very brief time with it, I would say that it is interesting, but not for me.
@dalto You have tested a lot of distros. The amount of data that must be in your noggin. You should write a distro summary guide. I for one, would read the out of it. Love your posts in general, but particularly ones like these.
About a year ago I actually started writing summaries of distros. I had this idea that it would be great to have distros reviews which focused on the real differences between distros and the things that matter long-term.
I gathered a bunch of empirical data for the first group of distros I was going to review so I could have some objective metrics in addition to the subjective metrics. I got about 50% through the first actual review and then I realized how much work it was and…stopped.
But, yes, I try to test most distros at least annually. Usually very briefly but sometimes for longer if they are interesting. I usually maintain over 100 VMs with various distros in them but that number was reduced greatly by some data loss I had a few months ago. It is slowly building back up though.
I am sure it is a daunting task. Your style of review, even the brief summaries, is what I always hoped distrowatch would morph into, something actually useful, instead of a general blurb, click-bait site.
Well the upside to it all, is that you frequent EnOS and we are blessed with your findings.
So why wait a whole week?
Your system your rule
out of it. 
Love your posts in general, but particularly ones like these. 
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