Recently the Cinnarch team announced the new name of the project, Antergos. They also released a new version of the OS with the new name. To find out more about this change and other things I’ve contacted Alexandre Filgueira. Below you can read what we’ve talked about.
1. Hello again Alexandre and thank you for accepting the invitation.
Hello, and thank you for being interested in our project.
2. You’ve just choose a new name for your project and also released a new version of you OS. Tell us more informations about the new name and the new features in this version.
Well, we learned the hard way, why a linux distribution shouldn’t be named by it’s desktop environment. Now we know better and we’re ready to bring you the better we can do under our new name and philosophy.
We’ve chosen Antergos as our name because I wanted to have a Galician word to let people know about my beautiful country. Antergos is the word to link the past, the present and the future. It is a very important word for Galician populations, having an ancient culture. And we are making a big change, from “what we were” to “what we are” and “what we want to become”.
This release has that big change of letting users to choose. But we fixed some important bugs in Cnchi, our graphical installer, and we’ve improved some aspects of our LiveCD. Also, because we know better now, we have a better designed software repo with some new packages like the razor-qt desktop and more to come.
3. The new installer Cnchi gives users the possibility to chose a different desktop environment. When did you took that decision and what were the reasons?
Well, when I saw that Cinnamon was getting behind with upstream development, the cinnarch crew started to talk. Many people had asked us about having multiple desktops but the GNOME 3.8 release in Arch was the ultimate trigger.
Luckily Cinnamon, thanks to the big relevance that took the announcement with Arch (because it was Arch, Cinnarch and Manjaro), talked about bring support for GNOME 3.8 and consider bugs the problems in Arch. So, thanks to the Cinnamon crew, and some Arch and Fedora devs, Cinnamon could be ported to GNOME 3.8 and included also in this our first release as Antergos.
But because of the fragile situation of Cinnamon we choose GNOME as default desktop and made a change in our single-desktop-support philosophy to become a more desktop-agnostic linux distribution.
We have Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce and Razor-qt(with KDE) available, but we have more to come like KDE, a better razor-qt, Enlightment or Openbox.
4. Is Cnchi still in alpha at this moment?
Yes, Cnchi is still in alpha. It works ok in most cases, but we think the work is far from being finished, so we’re gonna keep the alpha stage for a while longer, and bring new alpha features to users.
5. I saw in Transifex that there are a lot of languages added. How are the translations going?
Well, because Antergos was kept as a secret until the end, some languages were outdated by the time of this release.
We’ve released Cnchi with Antergos with 4 fully translated languages: English, Spanish, French and Galician; but right now people are finishing other languages and 7 more are almost completed. So I think it is going quite well. Thanks for the support.
6. You’ve launched a new website for Antergos. Will the old website cinnarch.com still be active?
cinnarch.com will be soon redirected to antergos.com and the same with the rest of webservices like forum, bugtracker etc.
7. I know it passed only a day since you’ve announced the new name and released the new version, but have you received any feedback so far?
Well, I love to sneak around in social networks to see what people say and I have to say that I red just 2 messages from 2 different twitter accounts saying that we made a wrong decision choosing Antergos as a name, but the rest of blog posts and messages were positive.
I did found something wrong with Intel cards making the iso unbootable because of a bug with GDM and the UXA acceleration method. I’m trying to find a fix for this using SNA acceleration and if everything goes OK I will release a bugfix ISO .
8. What are the plans for the future?
Like you could see in our announcement, we are now working with different desktops, letting the user have the last word about it and give freedom when choosing. Very different from what we were with Cinnamon as the only option.
Now we’re planning some great things to bring even more freedom to this step. Nothing done right now, but in early stages of “what should it be”.
Also, we want to keep working with Cnchi, our graphical installer to bring new features and improvements. Right now, one of our devs is working to allow Cnchi to install Antergos alongside any other OS and the same guy is trying to speed up the download process with parallel downloads of packages, like we already have in our CLI Installer.
Antergos official website : http://antergos.com/
Download Antergos : http://antergos.com/try-it/
