Archcraft

Reader supplied reviews for Archcraft Average rating 8.6 from 61 review(s) What are your thoughts on Archcraft? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 2026.02.022025.10.162024.10.222023.07.052022.09.162021.10.05 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 2026.02.02 Rating: 5 Date: 2026-03-03 Country: New Zealand Votes: 0 In spite of what some might think the main reason people use Arch is speed and stability. Whilst it can be commended for focusing on usability with some really nice cosmetic and functionality customisations, Archcraft unravels the core stability and speed I associate with native Arch. I've been an Arch user for six years and had an old laptop I thought might benefit from Archcraft given its focus on lightweight WM's like Openbox. Having loaded it onto a USB the OS took forever to install, much slower than Arch which I had previously installed on this system. When loading the OS on first start it was a little slow. Free -m showed ram usage on idle at 600MB approximately, which made sense given the OS's mods. What wasn't acceptable was it failed to update out of the box. A little tinkering with the command line fixed that but no sooner had I updated and used Pacman to install some essential apps, (I always do a lean "bare minimum" app install) than it started locking up. I restarted but the problem kept recurring. At this point I gave up and plan to install core Arch instead. Most likely I'll take the middle ground and install XFCE. In summary, lots of work has gone into making Archcraft a comfortable OS to use and look at. That said, core stability, lightweight functionality and speed issues need to be addressed with optimisation needed before I could recommend it. I'd call Archcraft as it stands "a work in progress". Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2025.07.12 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-09-16 Votes: 6 Arch-based distros are my preference and I have loaded a handful on my PCs. Manjaro. CachyOS. Garuda. Ezarcher. Recently, I installed Archcraft on an old Dell i5 Inspiron just for giggles. Pleasantly surprised. It's a keeper. I had to change the bios to UEFI to get the Ventoy iso collection viable on this old Dell. I installed Archcraft (archcraft-2025.07.12-x86_64) with calamares without an issue. SDDM login. OpenBox is the default interface which is kinda nice. OpenBox takes a little time to find settings (right click on the desktop for a context menu filled with stuff). The standard arch repos with the archcraft repo included. Here is a plus: YAY installed for a easy trip to AUR. After initial update and reboot, I was able to load my favorite browser (floorp) and apps, scripts, icons, themes, fonts and hyprland related goodies quickly. After getting Hyprland on all cylinders, I tweaked the SDDM to suit. Ten year old Dell is alive again. And, it is running as smoothly as other arch-based/hyprland PCs. In about 90 minutes, done. Congrats Archcraft maintainer(s). Thank you. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2025.07.12 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-08-30 Votes: 3 Pretty Good! At installation I went with just Openbox, and it worked pretty well with all of its customizations, a short tutorial as well was on their site to customize the themes, which just overall makes one of the best Openbox Experiences for an Arch-Based Distro. Of course, the customization and setup are really the only big thing that it does itself. After that point, its just Standard Arch, which makes sense as the main point of the distro in my view is just to get that setup, which is done quite nicely. Runs Great, and compared to some other Arch Derivatives (CachyOS) is simply the best at setting up window managers on an Arch Base. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 61 reader reviews of Archcraft...