 Over the last year or so, as I've done more distro reviews, I've started to get more picky when it comes to arch-based distros. Mainly because I feel that in order to be anything good you have to be a little bit special. You can't just be an easy to install arch-based distro because there's 12,000 of those things. You have to do something that is at least a little bit unique. And there really aren't that many out there that have strived to do this. Very few of them do anything beyond just creating a really pretty rice and installing the Calamari's installer. Today I'm going to be taking a look at a distribution called ArchCraft. Now I've been asked to take a look at this several times over the last year or so and I'm finally getting around to it. Now the first thing you should know is that as I said in the last distro review that I did, I'm going to be doing this on hardware. So this is going to be a little bit different. This is my first attempt at a refabricated distro review and it's going to be a little bit rough. So just keep that in mind as we go along that the layout of this review might be different from the ones that come after simply because I'll refine it and get better as I go along. So the first thing we're going to talk about as we usually do in these things is installation. Now the installation you're going to be seeing in B-roll was done in a virtual machine but I do have this on hardware. I'll show you that here in a minute. The installation for ArchCraft is very simple if you've chosen the Calamari's installer. So you have two options when you first go into the ISO. You get an option for the Calamari's installer and you get an option for a terminal base installer. And the biggest issue I have here is that they don't really tell you what the benefits are of one or the other. However, if you were to choose them you would soon figure out exactly what the benefits of one are over the other. So the Calamari's installer, which is what you'll see in the B-roll, is a very simple installer. It will take you through the regular Linux setup tips. It allows you to choose between EXT-4, B-butterafast, and things like that, whether or not you have swap. There's no special pages there to choose what applications are installed. Nothing like that, like you would see with ARCO or GRUIT or something like that. It's just a very straightforward step-to-step Calamari's installer. And it was very fast. Now on hardware I also used the Calamari's installer one time and I will say that this is the first time Calamari's hasn't got hung up scanning all of my hard drives. This was a very fast on hardware installation. Now the other installer, which I didn't try on camera, but I tried on hardware, is a terminal-based N-curses installer. And this is very much an expert installer. It's something that you will only want to use if you know what you're doing. It allows you to tweak the installation of ArchCraft in a way that is very similar to what you'd get if you installed Vanilla Arch. And it gives you options for like build parameters, kernels, things like that. It's very much in-depth and much more complicated than the Calamari's installer. So I highly recommend only using that if you know what you're doing. Now like I said, the biggest issue I have here is that on that screen that pops up at the beginning that gives you an option between the two, it doesn't really tell you which one you should use or what the difference is. So if you are a fairly new Linux user, you may end up choosing wrong. But the good news is it's very easy to stop. If you get confused going through the N-curses installer, just close out of that, open up the Calamari's installer, it's fairly easy. So that's installation. And like I said, on hardware, it was a very quick installation. It was maybe four or five minutes. And usually Calamari is very slow for me, at least at the beginning, because it always scans all my hard drives. It did not do that this time, which I was very impressed with. Now let's go ahead and show you what this looks like installed on hardware. This is what it looks like. And this right here is the open box window manager. So the first thing you should know is that it comes with open box and BSPWM. I will show you the BSPWM version here in just a moment. But this is the open box version. And it is, as you can see, very pretty. This is like a very Nord-like theme. They've done a very good bar up there at the top, which I find very nice. They've done a wonderful job of customizing and adding modules and making it look just spectacular. It has a button up here for the menu, which brings up Rofi. It has a power menu. It does have some extra empty spots here, which I'm assuming probably for battery or Wi-Fi or something like that. I'm actually not sure what those would be. But it does look very, very nice. Now, as I said, this comes with BSPWM and open box. Now, I'm not as familiar with open box as I am with other window managers. I've never been a floating window manager guy. If I'm going to use something floating, I'll just use a desktop environment. So I haven't spent very much time at all in open box, but I will have to say the work that they have done to make open box very, very usable is impressive. So the first thing you will probably understand about open box is that most of the moving around of the operating system is going to be done through either key bindings like a traditional window manager or through this menu that pops up when you right click the desktop. And this is where the version of ArchCraft really shines. They have done a tremendous amount of work to make this menu really nice. Now, this is a custom menu, and I know that because that's the way open box works. When you customize open box, you create this menu on your own. It exists, but you have to do all the entries and stuff on your own. And they've done a perfectly good job of creating a bunch of options here for you to use. And that includes not only being able to launch applications through categories, which we'll go through here in a minute, but also being able to take a screenshot, being able to record the desktop common places in your files, recent files, preferences, which is a place where they've done a lot of work to allow you to customize your setup right here from the menu. So you can get to open box settings. You can get to the compositor settings. You can change settings for the monitor right here in the menu. So if you needed to change the position of a monitor, if you needed to change the resolution, you can do it all from the menu right here. This is a very in-depth menu system. It doesn't require you to open up an app or anything to make any of these changes. You can also change the font from here. So if you do this, you can change the font. It brings up a font picker. You can then change to like just say you want to do this hit select. And it would actually change that font right from there. That is spectacular because what that means and that is Polybar up there. What that means is they've created an integration between that font picker and the Polybar configuration file. That is a lot of work. From someone who spent a lot of time customizing Polybar, let me tell you that they've spent a lot of effort to have all those integrations to change fonts, to change like the size of the font. It's really quite awesome. You can also change the terminal color scheme from here. Change the wallpaper here. This brings up nitrogen. So if you wanted to change to like this wallpaper, you just hit apply and it would change the wallpaper. The fact that it uses nitrogen is very nice. And again, that it's integrated. So you select the options from the menu and this pops up and you can change the wallpaper. Just like you would in a desktop environment. If you use like KDE or whatever, you can right click on the desktop and click an option in the menu and then change your wallpaper. And you can do that similarly just like this. You can also change the appearance settings, QT5 settings and Covantum from here. And it gives you links to the power settings, audio settings and the settings manager. Now, if this settings manager looks familiar to you, very good job because this is the XFCE settings manager. And you'll find that a common thread throughout most of ArchCraft is that they've used a lot of XFCE stuff here in order to have integrations with it. So things like managing power, things like managing the compositor, things like that. All that stuff is done through XFCE tools or XFCE like tools, which is very nice because it gives you the power of a desktop environment without actually using a desktop environment. You don't have any of the cruft the XFCE has, really. If you can say XFCE has cruft, it really doesn't. But you get all the features of a settings panel and stuff like that, which a window manager wouldn't normally have without any of the other stuff, right? Now, when you first boot in, you get this welcome screen. I've kept this up for a reason because unlike other welcome screens where they're mainly useless, the best thing about this one here is that it gives you the key bindings. So if you scroll down here, you hit this button here, it'll actually scroll all the way down and you can see all of the key bindings. And this is important because when someone else creates a window manager for you, you're going to be dealing with all of their key bindings. And that means they're going to be probably different than the ones that you probably would have chosen yourself. So you'll need to go here in order to see all of the key bindings. Now, there is a way to find them elsewhere. If you right-click in a menu and go to key bindings and then show key bindings in window, you get this window here. So if you don't have the welcome screen up and running right away, you can find them later on. You can also go to the rc.xml file and find them in there if you want to go spelunking into the configuration file itself. In addition, the welcome screen also gives key bindings for the BSPWM version as well. So if you need to get to the key bindings for BSPWM, those are all right here. Now, they are very similar to the open box key bindings, but obviously tailored for BSPWM. That is pretty much it for the welcome screen. Everything else here are tips and then some information about the distro itself. Overall, a very good welcome screen. It doesn't really have links to any applications or anything like that. So that's not really the focus of this distro. But if you are looking for information on how to use the thing that you installed, it has some good information there. Now, let's talk a little bit about installed applications. So the first thing that I want to say out loud is that by default, VIM is installed. So this is an amazing distribution. I mean, we could stop right here and I'd give it all the kudos in the world because no distro or very few distros come with VIM installed by default. It's just kind of a sad fact, unfortunately. I think it should become my default. But if you install Ubuntu, it's not there. If you install Mint, not there. You install vanilla arch, obviously, it's not going to be there. And that's, I mean, that's fine. It's not if it's hard to install. It's just this makes me happy. So VIM is installed by default. That's really all you need to know. That's the only application you need, right? Well, we'll talk about the rest of them, but I just wanted to point that out. Also, if you noticed, they've done some customization for VIM itself. So they have a custom VIM RC. I'm not sure if they have plugins or not. But they do have the status line at the bottom and they use tabs appear at the top. So again, you can see that they've done some work in customizing pretty much every corner of this distro, which is very nice. Now, in terms of installed applications, there's not very many. I was actually assuming because this is a two gigabyte ISO, I was assuming that there's going to be quite a few applications installed for you. But there's actually not. So you get settings, things like the file manager, which I believe is TUNAR, a few other settings, applications or accessories, Kvantum, Nitrogen Plank is the bar at the bottom. It actually comes with two terminal emulators. It comes with a lacquerty and it comes with XFC for terminal comes with X archiver for development. It has genie and meld graphics has GPIC and view noir for multimedia. Two of these things here. I installed. So I'm using OBS and audacity right now. I installed those. So those don't come in preinstalled for network as Firefox is a default web browser, and I'm not sure what it's going to use for male reader. It actually doesn't come with a male reader installed. That's just an XFC e quirk where it has the preferred applications as like web browser and file manager and text editor, right? You can click on those things and it'll bring up whatever you've said is preferred for office. It doesn't. It just has a document viewer. It doesn't come with LibreOffice or anything like that. You'd have to install that. And then for settings, most of the stuff is the XFC stuff that I talked about settings for mouse and keyboard notifications and stuff like that. All that stuff is going to be XFC for related. It's a XFC for back end, if you will. It also comes with G parted H top Ranger time shift, all that stuff installed. So you can use time shift for the butterf s, which if you chose butterf s in the installation, which I did, you can use time shift for the snapshots. So as you can see, it's very light on the installed applications. There's not a ton of stuff here. And I think that that's good. So it allows you to basically build up your system without having to deal with a whole bunch of extra craft. Now, this is the open box version of Archcraft. And it is, like I said, very pretty. And all the key bindings are fairly intuitive. You change two different workspaces using super in the numbers. You can shoot move between windows using the Vem keys. And super, you can launch several different applications with key bindings as well. All those things that are in the place where I showed you. And then all of the configuration files are here in the open box folder within .config. So if you know how to configure open box, this is where all of your configuration stuff would be, including changing the menu, including changing Polybar and Rofi. All that stuff is right here. The cool thing here is, though, that there are like 20 different themes here for you to choose from. And the ones that I've tried are really nice, just like the default one is very, very pretty. All of these are very well put together. Now, one thing that I didn't notice when I was going through the menu is that you can actually change the themes from the menu, which is not surprising given how thorough this menu system is. But I totally missed this part right here. I skipped right over it. As awesome as I think changing themes is, you'd think I would have noticed this, but I didn't. It's here and you can change them. Now, I'm not going to change to another one because I don't want to kill OBS, but just know that you have several themes here to choose from. And that, again, is another place where it kind of shows you that they put a lot of effort into making this really cool. Now, I'm going to stop here for a moment and I'm going to log out and I'm going to log back in, but I'm going to show you the BS PWM version. Okay, so this is the BS PWM version of Archcraft. And as you can see out of the box, it looks very similar to what the open box version looks like. They've done a good job of keeping cohesion here. Now, the differences between the two window managers are going to be quite obvious if you've ever used them. If you haven't, you'll notice the differences quite quickly because they are quite different. Open box is a floating window manager, whereas BS PWM is by default a tiling window manager. And they just kind of behave differently, but the biggest difference between the two in terms of Archcraft is in the open box, you get a menu system that you get when you right click on the desktop like I showed you before. But when you are in BS PWM, you don't get that. It doesn't have a built in menu system. They could add it if they wanted to. They obviously haven't, but that is going to be the biggest difference. Now, that means you're not going to have the easiest access to all of the stuff that Archcraft comes with, like changing themes. It doesn't mean any of that stuff's not here because you can still get to all the settings and stuff like that just by using Rofi by hitting the super key, but it doesn't have easy access in the menu. Now, the thing that confused me the most is like, how do you change the themes? Because unlike with the open box, there's no scripts here. Well, there are they're not really scripts. They're more like settings for specific things like they have a list of the colors and stuff like that in bash files, but they're not scripts that change the theme like you had an open box. Now, I'm assuming that those scripts do exist somewhere and I just didn't see them because there is a way to change the theme. So if we go back to the welcome screen or the tips and tricks screen, you can see by hitting control Alt and T, we're going to get an option for the themes. So let's just say we want to drag it here. Now, I'm assuming that OBS is going to crash here again. So if that does happen, we'll see a jump cut. Oh, no, we didn't get it. It didn't crash OBS, which is nice. I'm happy about that. So there's the Dracula version. And I have to say I'm not as impressed with that theme as I would normally be because the themes that I looked at in the open box were very well put together and different from each other. Now there were some, obviously they were similar, but this one here is exactly the same as the thing we just had just with Dracula colors. I'm going to see if we're going to change to another one. We'll choose this one. Yeah, I mean, that's a nice theme. I'm not, I'm just not as impressed with them because they don't look as different, I guess. Here's, here's a forest theme that's ever forest. A very nice color scheme. Look at a couple more. Let's see here. Let's look at the, actually go back to the cyberpunk one. That's cool theme and look for another one. Let's do this one. So they have some really cool themes. They're very cool color schemes. I'm very, I'm very interested in scripts that change themes because I'm writing one of my own for I3 and it has been a chore for sure because there are so many different components of the window manager that you need to change. You need to change the GTK theme. You need to change the terminal theme. You need to change the dunce theme. You need to change the poly bar theme. You need to change the window manager theme. All these things, they all go into that script and it is kind of a pain. But so I'm impressed that they've done this and that means that they've gone through and done one rice, one right for another and that takes time and effort. So that's definitely something that has impressed me. I wasn't as impressed with the themes here in BSPWM as I was with OpenBox but maybe that's just because OpenBox is new to me so it just seemed newer to me. Now the last thing that I wanna talk about is issues that I've had in the few hours that I've been using this and really there's only been one and that is that the monitors don't go to sleep. At least in the OpenBox version that I've been using for the most part. I spent most of my time with OpenBox. The screens wouldn't go to sleep. They went to sleep for a moment, came back and they completely forgot the monitor layout. So both monitors stayed on but this monitor wasn't even active. Like you couldn't move windows or anything. It was just like a mirror of this one. I'm not sure if that's an OpenBox problem or an ArchCraft problem. I'm not sure. I didn't do any troubleshooting on it whatsoever but that's just something that I did notice that happened and if that happened all the time it would definitely be a deal breaker for me. I haven't seen it happen again but then my computer hasn't gone to sleep since that happened. So that's definitely something that you might keep an eye out for. In terms of performance, it's been rock solid. It's been very speedy, nothing slowing down or whatever the installation was fast. It used about the same amount of memory as you would expect out of the box as any window manager very little in terms of memory resources. If you're curious about the versions for this it comes with ZSH as the default shell. It comes with kernel 5.18. I can remember this is based on Arch which I probably should have said before but I assumed it was probably, I mean it's called ArchCraft so I'm assuming it was obvious. But so you're gonna have most of the latest and greatest stuff because this is based on Arch. And obviously this is my proof right here that I'm running on actual hardware not on a VM. I'm assuming that I needed to actually point that out. Out of the box it comes with about 968 packages which is fairly low for distribution which is again very nice. And if we look at free-m here which is not going to be very representative to anything because I'm using OBS so it's using like two gigabytes right here. I have OBS and Audacity running. I have a couple terminals on so probably not the most useful piece of information but it's there if you want it. So bottom line, ArchCraft is a very, very nice ArchBase sister. So I wanna go back to what I said at the beginning where I said I'm very picky when it comes to ArchBase sisters nowadays because I want it to feel like they've put effort into making it something other than just Arch. You know what I mean? I want them to have spent time to make it their distro instead of just a Arch distro with a Calamari's installer. And unfortunately the vast majority of ArchBase distros are just that. They are a Calamari's installer with very little effort. Some maybe a theme or something like that maybe a button of applications pre-installed but for the most part very little, very low effort. And I mean, if you're just creating a distribution for yourself, that's fine because maybe that's what you want. But if you're trying to market to other people I want you to have put some effort into it. ArchCraft you can tell is a project that they've put a lot of effort into. They've created a bunch of themes. They've created that menu system in OBS which is just fantastic. They've created a whole bunch of polybars. They've done all of that while keeping a very minimal distribution where you can build up your application stack on your own. You can have a ton of stuff there that you don't need and basically they're allowing you to choose what applications you want. I would like to see some gooey way of choosing applications to install along their installers. So something maybe similar to what Arco does but maybe less confusing where they give you an option for some applications to install as the installer goes through. That way when you boot into your system you have all the stuff that you need. You don't have to spend time afterward installing software but that's a very minor nitpick. Isn't really necessary so it's just something that might be nice for some people. Other than that I'm actually very happy with this distribution. Would I run it full time? Yes, if I was still an arch user this would be a very good distribution for me and I would be perfectly happy here. Now the question would become then would this cause me to switch from Fedora to this and the answer to that is no I'm really liking Fedora right now so I don't see myself switching to it full time but I will say this I'm going to steal some of the things so at least I got something out of it I guess. So that is it for this video if you have thoughts on ArchCraft I'm sure there's stuff here that I missed, right? This is just a first look I only spent about two hours with this distribution and there are many different areas of a distribution that it's possible for me to just have missed things so if you have thoughts on this you can leave those in the comment section below if you have ideas on how I can make the first look videos like this a little bit better now that I'm doing them on hardware you can leave those in the comment section below as well if you can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast you can follow me on Macedon or Odyssey those links will be in the video description just below the like button if you could hit the like button I'd really appreciate that because it does help the channel so very, very much you can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast just like all these fine people thanks to everybody who supports me on Patreon and YouTube I truly do appreciate it without you the channel probably wouldn't be where it is today so I truly, truly do appreciate it thanks everybody for your support thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time