Archman 2019.09

There’s hardly an issue when Mayank Sharma doesn’t run into an Arch-based desktop distribution. Does this offer any benefits over others?

- Mayank Sharma

Developed by a mature but non-English speaking team of Arch specialists, this distro has a couple of things that aren’t particularly obvious. For starters, the project seem to support multiple desktop environments, but their latest release on test here is only available with the Xfce desktop. On that front, Archman 2019.09 includes the latest Xfce 4.14 edition that includes four years’ worth of improvements and polish.

Archman’s desktop includes the standard desktop furniture. There’s the centralised Xfce panel at the bottom, which features the Whisper Applications menu and the standard fare of icons including a workspace switcher, a clock and a notifications area. Interestingly, besides icons for the home folder and trash, the desktop has one for the HexChat IRC client. This seems strange, since an IRC client isn’t considered as an often-used app on a regular desktop distro.

It’s not that the distro is short of apps. The default Archman install contains all the usual desktop productivity apps such as Firefox, LibreOffice and