Chakra Linux

All hail the KDE king from Germany aka Chakra........Kubuntu's loss is the biggest gain for this upcoming distro which has improved leaps and bounds in recent times. Best of all its semi rolling release and unlike other RRs aka PCLOS and LMDE, this one gets updated ahead of schedule. There is nothing in KDE world comparable to Chakra, Kubuntu's loss is Chakra's huge gain so all ye KDE fans, don't bother looking elsewhere, download Chakra and enjoy the best KDE distro out there.

When distro upgrading, avoid apt-qt and use good old Konsole instead with pacman -Syu command and everything goes nicely. For incremental updates, apt-qt is fine.

Their forum is also helpful and if one is tired of big distros like Ubuntu and Fedora and RH, this is the old fashioned distro where the devs are right there listening to you.

 

Chakra keeps the philosophy of pure KDE but the essential gtk apps are installable with Bundle manager, the reason behind this is to keep the installation tidy of gtk dependencies strewn all around. When one uninstalls with the Bundle manager, all gtk dependcies which are kept in one container are removed rendering the system clean.

I have been using Chakra on both my 12 Core AMD Bulldozer as well as puny little AMD C50 ASUS netbook with 2GB RAM. Even though Chakra's initial footprint is higher as compared to Ubuntu Gnome, somehow the apps open quicker and even the underpowered netbook feels snappier. Also suspend and resume with AMD Catalyst on the netbook is totally functional unlike any other distro I have tested so far. The power consumption is better as well due to Chakra's use of the latest Kernel package. So far its turning out quite good and I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Unlike Ubuntu or Fedora, Chakra is a small team and as we have seen in the past with the likes of sidux etc. they sometimes disappear leaving the user in a lurch.