Why We Love Chakra
From The Chakra Project
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Contents |
The Problem
The world of desktop Linux is one of ever-increasing customization and complexity. User interfaces are becoming more and more distro-specific as time goes on, and the underlying system is becoming harder and harder for users to configure manually. The added complexity also means more opportunities for bugs and instabilities. There are still plenty of distros out there that offer a simple, transparent, Unix-like experience that maximizes user configurability (and is generally more stable to boot), but these are all distros aimed at experienced power users.
The Solution
Fortunately a distro doesn't have to be heavily customized to be easy to use. The answer is Chakra Linux, which is a fork of Arch Linux. This is not the kind of fork you eat with; a fork is when somebody takes somebody else's software, modifies it to their liking, and gives it a new name. Of course we all know that if somebody did that to Microsoft or Adobe software they'd get the pants sued off of their backside, but out here in free software land it happens all the time, and nobody minds. Arch is a distro that stresses simplicity of design and Unix-like configurability. More than almost any other distro, Arch is all about putting the user in the driver's seat. It's a rolling release, so new software is added to the online repositories as soon as it becomes available. This is a lot of fun, but it also means that sometimes an update is apt to break something.
Chakra actually started out as KDEMod, a more modular version of the KDE desktop environment for Arch. KDE comes as a pretty big software bundle, including a lot of stuff that you may not necessarily want but can't uninstall. KDEMod stripped things way down, releasing just the desktop environment with a handful of applications and leaving it to the user to install whatever he or she wanted. Eventually the KDEMod folks decided to split from Arch and create their own distro, which they named Chakra.
Chakra is still a lot like Arch, keeping the base system as simple, stripped-down, and user-configurable as possible. But it's a desktop distro first and foremost, and rather than trying to be all things to all people by offering a wide variety of desktops it focuses exclusively on the KDE desktop environment and it's native apps. The goal is to provide the ultimate KDE desktop experience on top of a simple, configurable, stable base. In order to accomplish this Chakra has evolved a novel "semi-rolling" release system. The core system has regular releases, roughly every six months but avoiding the fixed schedules that guarantee a buggy system. The desktop and the applications are upgraded as new releases become available. That way you get a solid, stable base with the latest apps on top.
Why Chakra?
There are several very good reasons to use Chakra, not only for Linux newcomers, but even for advanced users like myself! First of all, you get the stability that comes from a fixed, stable core system, but you also have the latest versions of the desktop and the apps (although they do get tested for a week or so before making their way into the main repositories). Then there's Chakra's single-minded devotion to the KDE desktop environment and it's native apps. In my opinion KDE is the finest desktop environment in the world, for any platform, and Chakra provides the smoothest, fastest KDE desktop experience I've ever encountered. There are some good native tools that make Chakra a great distro for noobs to ease into, while leaving the system transparent and accessible enough to satisfy even the most tweak-happy power user. In short Chakra is more stable than Arch, more up-to-date than Slackware, very fast, and features the best KDE desktop environment I've ever seen. It's also a very simple, clean design under the hood, as opposed to the heavily customized approach most modern "desktop" distros take. If you strip away the graphical desktop environment Chakra is just about as close to a "pure" Linux experience as you can get these days.
The Journey Begins...
By now you're probably just dying to boot up Chakra Linux and try it out for yourself! In the next chapter we'll get everything we need lined up to begin our Chakra adventure.