Readers who’ve been here for a while know I have been daily driving Arch Linux on my primary desktop for five years now, despite what I said about deleting it in a recent post. While I did dabble in Manjaro a few times in the years before then, I went all-in on vanilla Arch.
Of course, I knew there were several spins of Arch Linux out there. One of those spins is (or, should I say, was) Arco Linux. I knew about it in passing here and there over the years. Essentially, imagine Arch Linux, only it’s available with a lot of different spins, variants, and editions on its site for years, from simple setups (such as plain KDE or GNOME desktops) all the way to more advanced setups being ready out of the box (such as most tiling window managers, complete with shortcuts and defaults already preconfigured).
Those Times I Tried Out Arco
Now, did I ever use Arco Linux? Outside of spinning it up once or twice in a virtual machine or my secondary ThinkPad several years ago, not really, or at least not for a significant amount of time. While being able to spin up an Arch distro with a fully-configured Awesome WM was, well, awesome, it didn’t really solve any issues for me compared to using vanilla Arch Linux.
But everything is changing recently, as Erik Dubois, the maintainer of Arco, has announced that he’s calling it quits, effectively discontinuing Arco Linux as a whole as of later this year. I found out firsthand when watching a recent upload by DistroTube.
Why Does This Matter To Me as a Vanilla Arch User?
I’ll admit that I didn’t really use Arco much, I still strongly appreciated Dubois’ YouTube channel back around the time I was still a new Arch user. For instance, I learned specifically about theming qt5 applications outside of KDE from his channel.
I had been searching online at the time when I discovered this video for how to theme VirtualBox, as it was on a different theme from the rest of my then-current Awesome WM theme. Despite this being an Arco Linux video, everything applies perfectly fine to vanilla Arch Linux. After watching, I briefly scanned through the rest of his channel and discovered that it’s a treasure trove of small but useful Arch Linux configuration tutorials.
This is why the Arco Linux project mattered to me. Despite myself not really using Arco, Erik Dubois did such a tremendous job teaching others how to use Arch through his companion YouTube channel. It’s such an admirable effort he went through creating and uploading so many of these short tutorials and demonstrations. Unlike certain other Arch-based distros, it’s easy to appreciate what Arco Linux was for many of the same reasons one might appreciate EndeavourOS.
While both help you get an Arch-based installation up and running in record time, they both strongly encourage users to become familiar with configuring and troubleshooting their own systems. EndeavourOS always seemed like it was about getting users comfortable with the terminal, but Arco’s tutorials (and by extension, Dubois’ YouTube channel) felt like it was meant to help users find the most efficient and sensible ways to tweak or configure nearly anything on an Arch-based system. In this way, Arco was more than just another Arch distro. It was meant to help empower users through learning about Linux. This is also why I and many others have always had nothing but respect for the Arco project.
Thankfully, Arco users are not being left high and dry after recent Arco Linux releases. As DistroTube demonstrated in his video (and as mentioned on the Arco Linux farewell page), users will be able to make a complete transition from Arco to Arch through system tweaks. No need to do a clean reinstall or find another distro.
Did you ever use Arco Linux, or any other Arch-derivative distro? What did you think? If not, what do you normally run on your system? Feel free to leave a comment regarding what you think of all this. I’d love to know what you have to say.
Sudo Science 