After a little bit of pressure from the people responding to my previous post (My search for the best KDE Linux distribution), I have finally given in and tried out Chakra. The Chakra Project starts with Arch Linux as a base but, instead of forcing you to build your own distro piece of piece, Chakra comes more or less pre-packaged.
Installation
The installation was one of the best I’ve ever seen. For alpha software this distribution’s first point of interaction is already very polished – even warning me that it is not stable software and might therefore eat my hamster.
The install process even let me decide to install some very useful packages, like Microsoft Core TTF Fonts and Adobe Flash, right away. Even the Language & Time step was incredible, offering a rotating globe that I could drag around and manipulate.
The only issue I had was trying to create a disk partition to install the OS to. This was because I was trying this out inside of VirtualBox, and the virtual hard disk did not have any partitions on it whatsoever. There is a bug and (thankfully) work-around for this known issue with their Tribe installer, and after reading a quick walk-through I was once again ready to install.
The Desktop
The desktop is standard KDE version 4.4.2 after install. Opening up Pacman (or is it Shaman?) showed me a list of brand new software that I could install, including the newest KDE 4.5. One of Project Chakra’s great strengths will be in this rolling release of new software updates. The concept of installing once and always having the most up-to-date applications is very intriguing.
Unfortunately, as with most alpha software, Shaman is still pretty buggy and often crashed whenever I tried to apply the updates. Also unfortunate is that Shaman started a trend of applications simply crashing for no reason. I don’t want to give this distribution a bad reputation, because it is still pre-release software, but I think it goes without saying that the developers have some bug squashing to do before a stable release will be ready. Something I found rather strange is that the current default software selection that Chakra ships with includes two different browsers, Konqueror and rekonq, but no office software whatsoever.
Final Thoughts (for now!)
The Chakra Project looks very promising, albeit very unpolished at the moment. If they can manage to fix up the rest of the distribution, getting it just as polished feeling as the installer, this will definitely be one to look out for. I look forward to trying it out again once it hits a stable release.
PCLinuxOS is a shining example of a successful rolling upgrade distribution.