Chakra Linux is KDE – pure and simple. Its origins date back to 2006 when the late and great Jan Mette instigated the development of KDEmod – a light and modular way to bring KDE to Arch Linux. After releasing several versions, Jan decided to work on his own version of Linux, independent of Arch but inspired by "The Arch Way." The Arch Way encompasses the overall philosophy behind Arch Linux, which focuses on simplicity, elegance, versatility, and being user-centric [1]. Thus the Chakra Project was born.

In March, the project released Chakra 2017.03, codenamed "Goedel" [2] after Kurt Goedel, the famous mathematician and philosopher. This release, like previous versions, combines KDE and the Qt framework. The Plasma desktop makes for a picturesque and customizable environment. Although Chakra was developed under the auspices of Arch, it now stands as an operating system (OS) in its own right and has its own repositories [3].

Grabbing Goedel

The latest Chakra offering has a number of exciting updates. The 1.9GB Goedel ISO can be downloaded via BitTorrent or HTTPS from the Chakra Project download page [4]. Clear emphasis has been placed on selling the OS as it can easily be booted as a Live CD (Figure 1) or even within a VirtualBox virtual machine. Unlike most OSes, test driving in VirtualBox is made even easier by the inclusion of the Guest Additions on the DVD, which allow for extra features such as viewing the OS in full-screen mode.

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