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Certainly a niche within a niche, ArchLabs is supposed to be a homage to the Debian-based BunsenLabs, which is regarded by few users as being an unofficial successor to CrunchBang. As a very tiny project led by two developers, ArchLabs is not widely known among Linux users, currently holding the 80th spot on DistroWatch's Page Hit Ranking, also due to targeting intermediate and advanced users that already are familiar with Arch Linux.

After my quarrels with Archcraft, which also promises to be a minimal distribution, I decided to give ArchLabs another chance, after encountering some issues with its installer back in 2020.

Installation (VBox)

Since it lacks a live environment, the ISO, which is 789 MB in size, takes the user straight to two possible installation methods – its regular TUI installer and the installer with speech recognition enabled. Choosing the first option leads to a regular CLI environment, in which installer has to be manually entered to start the installation process. Once done, one can choose to adjust the font size, with the default being 16.

The Welcome window is being followed by a window offering a selection of options, with the mandatory ones being marked by an asterisk. Since no pre-formatting and partitioning was done, I decided to go step-by-step and create a new partition table and two partitions, skipping encryption and logical data management afterwards. Users can choose between five options to manage their partitions: One automatic script that wipes the entire disk and four manual tools, with those being cfdisk, cgdisk, parted, fdisk, and gdisk.

First choosing auto results in partitions being created but not being formatted to any format, resulting in the installer not mounting them and prompting a “semi-empty” error message to be printed (“semi-empty” as it does mention that the system cannot execute an arch-chroot command, yet also that no error message can be created just underneath the initial error message).

Starting from scratch, I chose one of the four manual options. Since the “curses based” options put me off (did both get “cursor” wrong or are both really cursed?!), I chose gdisk and was surprised that it did not a create a GPT partition table but a protected MBR partition table. My next option, parted, provided incomprehensible help with no flag allowing to create a new partition table. fdisk finally would do the trick and create a GPT partition table with two partitions. The remaining configuration work required much less time, choosing Openbox, xfce4, and some additional software to install, though I had to do the whole process one more time, as ArchLabs ran into a timeout error and, during a second attempt, froze when attempting to fetch packages from German servers. Adding Poland and Czechia seemed to do the trick and the installation, excluding the time required to configure the installation, took 20 minutes... and four virtual machines.

My third virtual machine was in the middle of creating its first initramfs, when my host decided to kill my network card and keep it permanently turned off for a day.

Installed System (Openbox)

Right off the bat, ArchLabs failed to detect the screen resolution and installed both the boot loader and the OS with the default setting remaining stuck at 800 x 600. After starting an Openbox session and changing the screen resolution (and starting a new session due to Openbox always behaving poorly when changing the screen resolution), the first obvious surprise was the bare-bone Openbox menu, which did not even offer a sub-menu listing installed applications. Since the installer did not allow to choose default applications, Xfce's Terminal was set to default. Editing menu.xml to change the menu's default Terminal to Alacritty did the work, while kickshaw, a GUI tool to customize OBmenu, refused to let the menu execute my preferred Terminal.

Speaking of kickshaw: It cannot create sub-menus listing applications sorted by type and creates a graphical glitch – like it tried to imprint its window decoration into the wallpaper – when being left open for longer than 30 seconds. ArchLabs does not ship with the more useful obmenu-generator usually provided by other distributions supporting Openbox, requiring manual installation.

Trying to download obmenu-generator revealed that ArchLabs only installed base-devel without configuring any AUR helper. Manually attempting to git clone and build yay repeatedly prompted an error message, saying that the AUR cannot be found.

Before trying another tool, I checked the rest the rest of the menu. The option “ArchLabs Knowledge Base”, supposedly a book-style documentation site, leads to a dead end. That was also the point when I noticed that ArchLabs lacks a keybinding for screenshots.

Xfce session

Getting fed up with how Openbox has been configured, I switched to Xfce, ony to notice that it also lacks a keybinding for quick screenshots. Xfce's keyboard seeting refused to accept Super/Windows + Print, apparently not even registering any imput from the print key. It did work with another key.

Performance

ArchLabs needs a little less than 500 MB of RAM when idle, keeping its promise at being lightweight.

Before I could do further tests, however, I came back to an unresponsive Xfce-Terminal that would cause the entire Desktop to crash upon closing the window, leaving me with a grey-ish display. The Desktop quickly re-appeared as if nothing happened, with the unresponsive Terminal suddenly working again.

Documentation & Forum

Since ArchLabs no longer provides any form of documentation besides release notes, the only way to find solutions for problems is their forum. Entering the site shows the most active threads, with most of them being categorized as “off-topic”. To report bugs, it is being advised to use BitBucket, though one can use the “bug” category in case a user does not have an account. Only 21 bugs were reported so far via the project's forum and trying to access the linked Bitbucket page merely shows a login screen. Anyone wanting to check this distribution's source coude is required to create an account on this hosting service.

Simply browsing the forum, there is a misconfiguration of the “previous page” option that does not take users back to the previously visited page but a JSON file of it. It is only possible to encounter this when having NoScript installed and not granting ArchLabs' forum trust privileges.

Other Observations

During my first attempt at installalling ArchLabs, VirtualBox notified me that this virtual machine was accessing my microphone, despite not selecting to boot the installer with speech recognition enabled. This only occurred once and did not happen again afterwards.

The screenshot tool used by ArchLabs ran so poorly after the virtual machine's first post-install boot that all screenshots I took during that session produced broken image files.

TL;DR

“The original vision behind ArchLabs was to take the look of BunsenLabs and put it on top of an Arch Linux system as Arch has more up-to-date packages. The speed and simplicity of Pacman and of course the Arch User Repository (AUR) are just added bonuses. Now that ArchLabs have (sic) become established we have developed our own look. We have kept true to our legacy by keeping our ISO images as minimal as possible and adding only core applications and utilities.”

So minimal that core feature of the project's supposed inspiration – a Live Desktop and a GUI-Installer – were removed during its first major update. It is a bit embarrassing to find out that AUR support is, indeed, enabled and functional, yet the system demands users to use a largely unknown AUR helper and will refuse a manual installation of an AUR package. It is even more embarrassing, on the other hand, that the CLI-Installer, which has been updated in February, still suffers the the exact same issues I encountered two years ago.

Of course, it is a small distribution that is being developed by two guys in their spare time. The community, despite being small and rather discussing off-topic matters, is friendly and welcoming and does its best at providing help. However, considering the amount of bugs and poor configurations I encountered and the source code being inaccessible to non-Bitbucket users, ArchLabs is not something I want to run on bare metal, let alone even use it as a daily driver.

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Hardware

Medion Akoya E4070 D

Processor: AMD A10–5700 APU @ 3.40 GHz

Display: Trinity (Radeon HD 7660D)

Memory: 4 GB RAM (3462 MiB)

Storage: 1 TB ST1000DM003-9YN162 (CC4G)

Network: RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Control