14 DAY TRIAL // Manjaro Unity Community Edition is a new respin of the Manjaro Linux distro, an operating system based on Arch Linux. This is one of the few distros outside of the Ubuntu ecosystem to adopt Unity, so it should be a very interesting experiment.
Given the fact that Ubuntu is the most used Linux operating system for the desktop right now and that the desktop environment used, Unity, is open source, you would imagine that there should be a flurry of distributions powered by it. There aren't. In fact, besides a couple of official flavors, Unity is hardly found in the wild.
A few small one-man projects tried to use Unity, but nothing really came out of them. Some say that Canonical is very rigid and they are not really supportive of other projects using their desktop, but it probably has to do with the large number of alternatives out there rather than anything else.
Manjaro Unity Community Edition with Unity is more than interesting
It feels strange to use an operating system with Unity that is not based on Ubuntu, although the experience is quite similar. There are some key differences between them, but it all boils down to the default packages that are included. For example, Manjaro Unity Community Edition uses GNOME 3.12.2 packages and a newer Nautilus file manager.
Interestingly enough, the developers don't use the System Settings from Ubuntu, which provides much better access to some of the features in Unity. They chose to use the GNOME Control Center from the GNOME project, which is much less populated with options.
The project was possible because people have been trying to bring Unity to Arch Linux for some time. The Unity-for-Arch repositories have been in the works for more than a year and it looks like they finally managed to get them running.
All the regular packages are accounted for
If you ever used Ubuntu, it will be easy to adapt to the Manjaro Unity Community Edition. Most of the major applications, like Firefox or Thunderbird, are integrated by default, but there are a few new ones. The developers also added Chromium (not sure why), Flash is installed by default, the default music place is Guayadeque, and the network traffic goes through TOR. Also, there is no online search for Unity.
You can download Manjaro Unity Community Edition OS from Softpedia. There are both 32-bit and 64-bit versions and they weigh quite bit, a little over 2GB. The system works very well under VirtualBox, if you want to test it before installing it.
