Reader supplied reviews for Artix Linux
Average rating
9.2 from 215 review(s)
Version: 20250407
Rating: 10
Date: 2026-02-20
Country: Germany
Votes: 4
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because I wanted an Arch-style rolling system, but systemd-free and with a real choice of init. I went with s6, installed classic i3 + xlibre, and it's honestly flying. The install was painless, and once I was in, the system felt lean and predictable. Boot is quick, i3 stays snappy, and it doesn't feel like there's extra baggage in the background. Updates are extremely fast too. In practice, I'm usually getting packages very close to Arch, generally within a day or two. And the init side is not just lighter, it's also easier to live with than the monstrous systemd setup: service control feels direct, and the tooling stays out of my way. Overall, Artix hits a sweet spot: fast, clean, configurable, and still practical as a daily driver. If you like simplicity and you care about keeping the system minimal while staying current, it's a really satisfying distro. 10/10!
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Version: 20250407
Rating: 10
Date: 2026-02-12
Country: Brazil
Votes: 7
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Freedom.
That’s what Artix offers.
If you want comfort without responsibility or freedom without knowledge and free of consequences, this is not the distribution for you.
Since I installed Artix (coming from Gentoo, before Devuan, Mandriva, before Debian, before Kubuntu, before Ubuntu, before OpenSuse, before Conectiva Linux, not to mention all of them, but only the distributions I’ve used the longest), I’ve felt the return of freedom. Freedom to decide how my system will be, how it will behave, what it will or won’t have, and how I want to work with it.
First, I am free from SystemD; second, I have X11 back with Xlibre, and Plasma is working well with X11 thanks to the SonicDE project.
I don’t like anything shoved down my throat, especially when so many large corporations, whose interests are far from being our best interests, are behind all the things pushed to us.
The computer is a tool. And I decide how to use my tools.
Artix is great.
If you like knowing what you’re doing, aren’t afraid to learn, and take a few slips here and there, this distribution is for you!
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Version: 20250407
Rating: 1
Date: 2026-02-06
Votes: 2
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Artix is a pretty interesting distro because it's genuinely one of the few Arch derivatives that offers a real technical difference, not just a visual remix. Being able to remove systemd from your system entirely, or at least almost entirely, is a big selling point. That said, I've run into far more issues on Artix than I ever did on Arch. Packages here tend to break with a relatively high frequency, sometimes even affecting the init system itself, which is, to some extent, an expected side effect when you support multiple init systems. You also won't find every package that exists in the Arch repos, and while you can add Arch's repositories to fill that gap, that's not exactly a great idea in many scenarios. Sooner or later you'll run into unsatisfied dependencies, since a package that's already updated on Arch might still be lagging behind on Artix. I've also seen weird situations where pacman reports an available update, but when you try to install it you get "file not found" errors because the package failed to build on the server side, yet somehow still made it into the database as if it were fine. Just today an elogind update landed that completely breaks user services on OpenRC, which I use, leaving downgrade as the only way to restore normal behavior, and that's just a mess. Problems happen everywhere, of course, but on Artix it sometimes feels like there's a lack of testing and polish in certain areas, and that made the experience pretty unpleasant for me. I hope it's just a rough phase, but right now it's a hard no for the sake of my sanity.
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