Archman is an Arch Linux-based distribution developed in Turkey. The project's website is available in both Turkish and English, which makes the distribution approachable to non-Turkish audiences. Archman has various releases with different desktop environments and release dates. In this review, I will be reviewing Archman's Xfce 2019-09 release, which is codenamed Lake With Fish.

To begin, I downloaded the 1.6GB ISO and copied it to a flash drive. I rebooted my computer, turned off Secure Boot, and started Archman from the flash drive. The boot process was quick, but I ended up at a graphical login screen instead of a working desktop environment. I pressed the Enter key and I logged in without needing a password.

The live desktop looked very nice. It is an interesting blend of classic and modern. The live desktop has icons for the user's home folder and Trash. There is also a shortcut for Hexchat and the Calamares Archman Installer. The panel at the bottom of the screen holds the application menu, shortcuts for showing the desktop/quickly minimizing all running applications, Firefox, the user's home folder, sections for the currently running applications, switching desktops, a clock, Bluetooth and wireless controls, a battery meter, update notifications, volume control, and a log out/reboot/shutdown shortcut. The panel is 70% the width of the screen and set to automatically hide.

I looked around the live desktop for a little while. I tested to make sure that everything was working okay with my hardware, and once I was certain that all my hardware worked, I moved on to installing Archman.

Although there isn't any support built into Eoan's apt package manager for automatically taking snapshots yet, we can demonstrate a snapshot—oops—rollback moment manually. In the above gallery, first we take a ZFS snapshot. Eoan has split our root filesystem into tons of little datasets (more on that later), so we use the -r option for zfs snapshot to recursively take snapshots throughout the entire tree.

Now that we've insured ourselves against mistakes, we do something we're going to regret. For the purposes of this demo, we're just removing Firefox—but we could really recover from anything up to and including an rm -rf --no-preserve-root / this way with a little extra legwork. After removing Firefox, we need to roll back our snapshots to restore the system to its original condition.

Since the root filesystem is scattered through a bunch of individual datasets, we need to roll them all back individually. Although this is a pain for the casual user without additional tooling, it does make it possible to do more granular restore operations if we're feeling picky—like rolling back the root filesystem without rolling back /home. Ubuntu will undoubtedly eventually have tooling to make this easier, but for the moment, we do a bit of sysadmin-fu and pipe zfs list to grep to awk to xargs, oh my.

The command line acrobatics might have been obnoxious, but the rollback itself was instantaneous, and Firefox has returned. It still doesn't work quite right, though, due to orphaned filehandles—we rolled back a live mounted root filesystem, which is kind of a cowboy thing to do. To make things entirely right, a reboot is necessary—but after the reboot, everything's the way it once was, and without the need to wait through any lengthy Windows Restore Point-style groveling over the filesystem.

My music requirements are simple. I have many great qualities, but a refined ear isn't among them. With an aural sensitivity of a comodo dragon, my needs come down to a simple player that is pleasing to the eye, comes with a semi-modern layout, and most importantly, will not annoy me with badly arranged albums, titles and tags. The last piece has been my chief music-related woe for years.

When it comes to music players, I'm kind of okay here. VLC does the job, and when you tweak it, it's quite delightful one must say. Then, when I'm feeling adventurous, there's Clementine, which features splendidly on the desktop, with a clean interface and tons of goodies. And yet, now and then, I go about testing music applications, because music collections won't sort themselves, now will they. To wit, Quod Libet.

Let's see how we wrap this up. If we look at CentOS 8 as it, then it comes with lots of problematic areas, which preclude it from being fun and enjoyable out of the box. The big issue is the ability to manage Gnome extensions, without which the desktop simply isn't usable. But then, if we remember this is a server distro, never intended for desktop use per se, things look quite all right, as there are many dedicated for-home systems that manage much less than this. Don't forget stability and ten years of support.

On top of that, I was actually able to achieve a fair deal, I managed to add new and cool software, multimedia and smartphone support are quite good, and you can depend on this system going forward. Performance is meh, networking can be better, and there should be a simplified mechanism to enable the desktop element. All in all, CentOS 8 deserves something like 7.5/10. After polish and tweaks, a rather nifty 9/10. Plus CentOS 8 is better than its predecessor all around, respect. You should try.

I am going to attempt an in-vivo upgrade. Maybe a Plasma test, too, yes! And CentOS Stream, which might be just what I've been looking my whole life - a rolling-release version of the distro designed to stay modern and relevant even many, many years after the initial release. This could be the magic formula of stability, support and latest software. We shall see. Plus I owe you all those tutorials. Stay tuned.