Nosonja

I use practically every day either ArchBang, KahelOS, BridgeLinux or Arch-Lemur, and now I enjoy testing Nosonja! For old & medium PCs, my dream would be a mix between the nice ideas from Arch-Lemur and Nosonja (ie. interface design and graphical software tools)... By the way, I use also Fuduntu which is interesting too, to explore... Anyway, thank you for your nice work!

This is a long time that I am looking for a good, user friendly, linux distribution based on Arch linux. I have tried different other options but I was never convinced. From my experience, not any other Arch based distribution was mature enough to be easily usable by beginner (or intermediate) users. Sometimes, it was not simple to set the keyboard layout without manually modifying configuration files; sometimes, no efficient package manager was installed by default, etc. From my point of view and experience, Nosonja is the first desktop distribution based on Arch linux that can be directly used by beginners, as a desktop replacement for Windows or OS X. The “essential” packages and tools are installed by default: graphical system settings & configurations tool, a software manager (PacmanXG) that allows the user to install missing applications, including the ones from AUR (Arch User Repository)! This distribution is very young (less than one month when I am writing this review) and small issues still exits. For example, I experienced a problem during installation, when trying to set the password for the just created user (just skip this step!). So, don’t expect to have a desktop distribution as polished and mature as Ubuntu or Linux Mint, which exists since 2004 and 2006 respectively. But for its first release, Nosonja is already a very user friendly and directly usable distribution for beginners! In conclusion, I highly recommend this distribution to anyone who is looking for a user friendly linux distribution based on Arch linux. Enjoy