Quote:
Originally Posted by Matthew Vita
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It is just an installer disc. When you install
Arch all you have is a working system and that's it (just a command prompt). You have to go and install whatever you want from there, such as the desktop environment, etc. One benefit is the core system is extremely small and lightweight so it is easy to keep it that way. It also uses
BSD style sysinit which simplifies configuration of startup services. There are a few things such as that and
netcfg for configuring networks that I think are wonderful tools. The best feature of all is probably the
package management system. You can install many programs from the repositories, even more from the
user repositories, and if you still need to build a program, you can write a simple
PKGBUILD file to build and install it as a package. I believe it is the easiest distro to build your own packages in . You do have to be really comfortable with command line to even install it, though. And here is the
FAQ.
Openbox can be installed on a lot of distros to get a similar desktop. It's lightweight and uses a couple of xml files for configuration. Openbox can also be used in conjunction with Gnome or KDE.
Conky can be run in any Desktop environment as far as I know and a terminal can be put on the desktop of Gnome with
Devilspie.