When I came across a discussion about Ctlos distribution, I couldn’t pass by and installed it. People were very positive about this variation based on Arch. It turned out they were very positive, but first things first.
Installer
The distribution is done with Calamares. The installer is pretty much the same except for the offline and online install options. In the latter case you have a wide range of different environments, packages, fonts, drivers and some software which can be chosen while installing. I, accordingly, chose the default Xfce. But there is also gnome, and Kde, and tile de… in a word, for all tastes.
I should note that if you choose the online installer, at the stage of 70% installation visually hangs – and for a long time. In fact, everything is fine, just at this point all the accumulated updates are downloaded. This way, after installation you already have everything fresh and don’t have to bother with an update as well. So be patient:)
The system
From the box the system is set up perfectly – it’s an Arch without extra preinstalled packages and well optimized. So, at boot the OS consumes about 370 MB, but launching the browser of course makes its voracious adjustments:)
On the official OS site there is a mention, that fonts are additionally adjusted. And what can I say, they are indeed configured! All the other distributions had to play with font config, to find a way to infinality-patches, which are not even really supported, since they became part of the new freetype.
Here, for the first time, fonts out of the box look the way I want them to on my monitor.
By the way, “the way I want” can be said about almost everything in the distribution – a minimum of unnecessary, works quickly, the presets are as they should be. The only thing I did was to move down the panel and bring it to the classical look – by default it is at the top and the control buttons appear on the panel when the window is opened (as in Unity).
Of course, I installed my favorite theme and changed icons, except that the wallpaper is default. About some more settings – a little later.
Preinstalled here yay and pamac and made necessary changes in ready configs mpd and ncmpcpp, which again saves me time. I just have to enter two commands (they are in the commented out mpd config segment) and I’m done. It’s very convenient.
Speaking of yay – this thing eliminates dependencies during installation even better than pamac. And when I used to install pamac player deadbeef from aur – pamac doesn’t want to, but yay does) And when I used to install infinancial patches on manjaro, only yay could correctly solve all conflicts and dependencies without crashing my system.
Next – among other things in the list of applications is Ctlos Helper, where you can install some more software, fonts, update keys and mirrors. That’s handy stuff.
My settings
I have installed zRam in addition to the usual theme and software:
yay -Sa ezzram. sudo systemctl enable ezzram.service && sudo systemctl start ezzram.service
And configured it in file /etc/ezzram.conf (30% of RAM + your number of cores, compression is not touching).
After configuration do
sudo systemctl restart ezzram.service.
In addition, installed kernel xanmod-lts, because it has patch le9 – another modification aimed at fixing the problem of Linux working with almost full RAM. As a result, with a bunch of open tabs you can switch between them quickly and the system does not freeze. Of course, there are a lot of different optimizations, but I am not particularly interested in the rest.
yay -Sy linux-xanmod-lts linux-xanmod-lts-headers
I’m putting the LTS kernel because something in i915 broke on the new kernels and I have fun graphical artifacts in my system. And the 5.10 doesn’t have them.
Note that AUR doesn’t have this kernel ready, it will be built on your machine. On my Chinese calculator this process took about two hours.
My impressions
I like ctlos linux – since everything works well so far I stay with it until I break something. Works lightning fast, fonts look good – and it’s still the same arch without extra packages and with a simple installation. I recommend giving it a try.
A set of software, obviously, like everyone else – messengers, chrome, text documents. I listen to music in a clear way) I watch movies and TV series via popcorn-time, because megogo is too far behind the schedule of fresh releases. Sorry mister archeologists, but this version of popcorn had to be installed via deb-package because I failed to find the native build and convert it via archalien. But dpkg package for Ubuntu successfully worked on arch as well.
Just in case, this is not the way to do it – except for very few packages with minimal dependencies, better without dependencies at all:)
I haven’t found any problems with the system. Keep watching.
