TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

The release announcement and website for Ark Linux proclaim it to be "easy to install... but powerful enough for longtime Linux users." I took that as a challenge.

I get ribbed from time to time by people who claim that I unfairly judge some Linux distributions by holding them to a standard for which they were not designed. Fair enough. I know Slackware isn't a desktop-oriented distribution. Gentoo probably won't ever be like Ubuntu, either.

When a distribution like Ark says it's squarely targeted at a desktop user, I pounce. Here is my desktop, let's see what you're made of.

Install:

The initial boot screen isn't going to win any awards, but that's not what made me step back. After running through the initial load, I was brought to this screen. Now, I've seen some folks try and make installation idiot-proof but these Ark folks went WAAY out on a limb with this one. They even go so far as to define what "clicking" means.

I was annoyed that the only time zone options I could choose were "America/New York" and "America/St. Barthelemy." I generally choose "America/Chicago" since I'm in Central Standard Time. Where the heck is St. Barthelemy anyway?

I chose "System Install" and was brought to a screen with Tetris. I decree that ALL Linux distributions should let me play Tetris while installing. Solitaire is good too, it's just the idea of giving the user something to do, which is something I appreciate.

My only real complaint here was that at certain points during the install the game would slow down to the point of not moving for several seconds. Oh Ark, why do you tease me so?

I noticed that although I had selected English (US) on the previous screen I was still getting some packages installed in other languages, such as "KDE-Dutch."

Install eventually finished, and I was given the option to keep playing my game. That was considerate.

Reboot showed me a GRUB boot menu and a pleasant bootsplash, which brought me to a pretty plain KDE desktop.

MP3/MPG/WMV support was included. Lack of gcc and kernel headers prevented me from installing Nvidia drivers. Wireless drivers were a lost cause as well.

In case anyone else tries this, I thought I'd share a trick I picked up. While getting the screenshots for this rant in VirtualBox, the installer would freeze repeatedly at different spots.

I rebooted several times and couldn't figure out what caused it. I eventually tried giving it "noacpi nousb" options at the initial boot prompt, which seemed to fix it.

Software Selection:

OpenOffice was present, but no Firefox, GIMP or Pidgin. I like Konqueror and all, but Firefox just works better for me. I've never really been a fan of Kopete for IM either. No versions of Java or GCC were installed.

I noticed a couple of standout additions in the games menus: SuperTux and TuxRacer. A unique thing I noticed was a program called Ark Mission Control. It really just presented the usual KDE configuration apps in a different way.

Choosing to "Install Packages" brings up Kynaptic, which looks like a greatly-simplified version of Synaptic. I saw no option to change repositories. I also saw no descriptions for the packages whatsoever. This won't help a user new to Linux at all. Ubuntu's Add/Remove programs is a better tool for those people.

Conclusion:

As much as Ark tried in the beginning to help even the most clueless new user, they fell flat once the desktop was actually installed. I could find no tutorials anywhere or any indication of what do to once brought to the desktop. If you're going to hold someone's hand through the install process, don't just throw them in the deep end of the pool once it's installed.

For veteran users, I see nothing of particular interest in Ark. It's an rpm-based distribution with some different window dressing. There's hardly a compelling reason to use this over something like Fedora, SuSE, Slackware, Debian, or Ubuntu.

While promising at first, the distro didn't hold out. The Ark team could stand to give some more value-added features to Ark or risk getting lost in the mire of mediocre sort-of-user-friendly desktop Linuxes.