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I have tested Manjaro before and it is easy to install and easy to maintain because the devs do it for you. Manjaro uses it's own repos.

Antergos on the other hand uses the Arch repos - so once installed, you will be running Arch. So Antergos is pretty much about installing Arch and a desktop environment in an easier way than the traditional Arch approach.

In other words; if the installation is not easier then Antergos pretty much is useless

So I boot up the LiveCD:

I get a nice overview of my install options:

I go for the GUI installer. It lets me pick the DE - Gnome shell is the default.

So I pick Xfce... Here i get a nice option of setting up the stuff. Really user friendly.

I go on to the partitioning and I also get the option to encrypt my setup- All really nice and userfriendly:

I am prompted about my user etc and then it is time to reboot.
The GUI installation so far has been extremely easy and friendly. So I reboot and remove the install media and get to the Login screen:

And there I am completely unable to log in I repeat the entire enchilada and it does not help. The user is there but there is no indication of the DE on the bottom left.
When I enter the password I am simply returned to the Login page - so I am stuck there.

So the Antergos GUI installer does not work
Going for the CLI installation then:
This is pretty much about the same steps as the GUI but you need to know the name of you locale etc. It is nothing for complete greenhorns - but if you have used Linux before you will manage just fine. It is not difficult.

And oh wonder: This time it all works.

I am logged in to my fresh Xfce environment

I re-arange the panels because I like the main panel on the bottom:

Then I go to the terminal and discover that my keyboard is not correctly configured. It looks like that locale config is not "sitting".
So I go to the Xfce settings panel and add Norwegian and delete the default US keyboard there.

Now it pretty much works as it should.

So is this an easy to install Arch? No I don't think so. It may be "easier" than the traditional Arch install ..but if you have to hunt bugs after the install you may spend more time with this.

It is Arch to 100% though - and Arch is good if not the best distro out there.
And there is a market for "easy" Arch installing - so the idea is good.

Antergos does not seem to be quite there yet though. If you want a user friendly option Manjaro is a great alternative. And there the install works just fine.

Using Antergos is like using Arch but Antergos comes with some important stuff pre-installed.
It comes with pacmanXG as a GUI frontend for the fantastic pacman. PacmanXG is only depending on X and works in every DE. It also is an entire control panel for your system:

It is really fast when searching for programs - In fact I have not found a package manager in any distro that searches this fast.
Flash works out of the box (if you chose it during installation).
You may add yaourt and install Octopi from AUR if you want a QT based Pacman GUI - that will bloat up your system a bit but you will get a good package manager there too.

The Antergos guys are on to something here - and it might just be the Xfce DE that does not install properly with the GUI installer.

But that was the one I chose.....

I downloaded Antergos again today to see if there has been some development to the installer.
This time I did not find XFCE4 among the install options - but I did find Openbox.

So I used the GUI and simply installed it - It was super easy! The locale the partitioning and everything went like a breeze. You do not even have to understand what partitioning is to make this installer work.

So now they are not only on to something - they are there.

Antergos is an easy to install Arch - nothing less

They use the Arch repositories + one extra Antergos repo.

An may I say that the Openbox implementation is beautiful too?
The Login screen:



The desktop:

viking60 wrote:I downloaded Antergos again today to see if there has been some development to the installer.
This time I did not find XFCE4 among the install options - but I did find Openbox.

Hmmm, I must say that if I am going to run a DE, I am kind of a fan of XFCE.

Does the Antergos install try to fill you up with fat dependencies such as Java, Python, etc.? Oh, and does it have a default Office suite included?

S.

I should have addressed that.
My Openbox came with the libreoffice installer ( I cannot remember if I actively chose it). The installer is flexible and lets you chose third party packages like flash extra fonts and java and gives you other choices to set up your system - I went for a pretty complete setup.
Antergos is basically an Arch install where some DE's have been set up for you and the AUR has been made available - In Arch we do it from scratch and get only what we want.
I know that you can install a fully functional XFCE later on - and remove Openbox (which is small anyway).



And I do have python installed as a dependency of another packet.

Python is needed by a lot of other python tools like python-cairo, python-docopt, python-xdg
It can be removed i guess.

Python fan here.

Nice.

I wonder, at the point of choosing the DE, can one hold down the Ctrl key and possibly install more than one?

I've been eyeing distros like this and Manjaro, but can't quite seem to be able to let go of the love of Arch itself just yet.