Arkane Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Arkane Linux Average rating 9.0 from 1 review(s) What are your thoughts on Arkane Linux? 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: -- 2025.05.08 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: 2025.05.08 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-07-05 Votes: 2 I would highly recommend Arkane for anyone looking to customize an atomic/immutable version of Arch. I was interested in using Arkane based on a very positive experience with Bluefin Linux based on Fedora Silverblue. But I've always liked Arch and wanted to know if one could get a similar setup with Arch. Installation of Arkane is the usual iso-based installer approach. The process is very simple and you have almost no choices to make (it is an "opinionated" distro!). The choice really comes once you've rebooted into your installed system. The base image comes with a lot of sensible Gnome choices But then which Flatpaks are you going to install? Which Gnome extensions will you add using the included "Extension Manager." Which Arch packages might you want to "layer on" the base image? etc. The real beauty of this approach (in addition to all of the cited benefits of atomic systems --- like they are very hard to break and feature a lot of sandboxed apps) is if you choose to "build your own image" using Arkane as a base. Arkane's user documents and documentation around customizing an image are quite clear. I ended up forking Arkane's "arkdep" github repo and then defining my own image with the layering I needed. This is a satisfying exercise as it forces you to think through your choices and explore alternatives. At the end you have a nice, reproducible set up that you can manage for updates etc. I was able to reproduce everything I like about Bluefin Linux, but have a system based on Arch. Arkane's repo has other "test" images that may appeal to users -- a KDE-based image, one Manjaro is pursuing to develop their own atomic version called "Summit", one that produces a CachyOS-based znver4 image, an experimental Debian based image etc. The website's documentation is good and concise. If you get the appeal of atomic distributions, love Arch, and want the power to make your own choices regarding your system -- Arkane is a fun. My hope is that the developer continues Arkane and that more resources are attracted to the project. It would be nice someday to have an equivalent of Blue Build to allow a simple way for users to set up their own daily image rebuilding and deployment from Github. Was this review helpful? Yes No