Obarun

Reader supplied reviews for Obarun Average rating 8.7 from 16 review(s) Version: 2025.11.16 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-01-24 Votes: 3 I write this as somebody who has had machines using Arch, Void, NixOS and Alpine - and I prefer Obarun to them all. Obarun is everything people look for in Arch. Except slightly better. Basically it's Arch but with a better init system, and with slightly more control. It works really well, it's been my daily driver since 2021, and even though the 66 system control tools are in a state of development, they are very well built. Keeping track of the news on the distro page is recommended though, because occasionally there are stability-breaking updates that need some manual intervention. This distro has a small but very loyal following, so a large community is not available, but its strong points more than make up for that. It works off the Arch ecosystem, including the AUR, and runs fine. I've noticed that whenever a package requires systemd (and that is a LOT of packages, dependency on systemd is very common) it runs just fine if you just tell pacman to ignore the dependency. So far I've not run into any problem whatsoever ignoring these dependencies. So if you want a distro like Arch, but more transparent, lighter and more customizable, Obarun is for you. If you're not handy with Linux, or want everything to hold your hand and detest the terminal, it's not for you. Version: 2022.06.08 Rating: 10 Date: 2023-11-12 Votes: 6 2023.10.13 edition (there have been a few images since last reported to DW) works excellent Installer is bulletproof on VM and hard disk, bios or efi, I've installed it in 4 machines new and old. This is about the only TRUE without-systemd full distribution, with nearly most of arch packages working well, or rather faster with less resources used. Obarun is approaching a decade of history and reliability and those of us who got to experience it keep coming back. I would add joborun for more demanding users getting closer to bleeding edge (arch-testing) and are interested in building the entire installation otpiimized for machine from source, otherwise the same with Obarun. If you like pacman and dislike systemd and its biproducts (elogind, udev, ...) and you want simple clean builds and dependencies Obarun and Joborun are for you. The myth about instability and breakage of Arch is more of an identity and scarecrow of arch, but Obarun builds well after arch-stable to avoid any such rare mishaps. If it wasn't for Obarun I would leave linux all together and move to BSD land, openBSD most likely. There hasn't been a distro I tried that even comes close to this. Version: 2022.06.08 Rating: 6 Date: 2023-07-12 Votes: 3 Pros: - systemd-free - 66tools is a convenience layer on top of s6, and it runs great! You can write scripts similar to systemd unit files Cons: - the community is poorly managed. They don't have an active chatroom (I went there once and there were only 2 or 3 people) and you can't sign up on the forums. I've emailed the owner but never got any responses. - Many of the 66tools commands aren't logically consistent, so they have usability issues. - The docs are outdated. As much as I want to use it, I've had to go back to Ubuntu. See all 16 reader reviews of Obarun...