UPDATE – The Xfce edition (i.e. a ‘lite’ edition) will live on, but the main branch of development will be the Budgie edition. They may not have releases released at the same time. Both editions can be identified as being distinctively ‘Antorcan’ for their system tweaks (i.e. preload and enhanced security) and their custom browser and office suite installer ‘wizards’.
TL;DR – Antorca is switching to Budgie as the default desktop environment.
It’s been a while since there have been any public builds of Antorca or even news of its development. I’ve been pretty busy with uni and will continue to be so for another 2-3 months.
However, I’ve managed to keep the Antorca development virtual machine up to date with the latest packages from the Debian Sid repositories.
An unfortunate incident that happened just yesterday has led me to consider making the big leap from the Xfce desktop to Budgie on Antorca. I was working on a C assignment and accidentally deleted 2 weeks’ worth of work in an instant all thanks to Thunar’s ‘Delete’ option (luckily I made backups a few hours before, I just forgot how to reimplement specific methods).
Sidenote: I’m not putting the blame squarely on Thunar but having an option to do an equivalent to a ‘rm’ command in a graphical environment is painful.
Having played around with the Ubuntu Budgie derivative, I was impressed at how Budgie has drastically improved in performance in the last couple of months (I was considering making Budgie the default desktop environment for Antorca, initially). I decided to test out Budgie on a clone of the Antorca development VM and I was pleased with its performance, and its sensibility and minimalism in its design.
I’m not really a fan of customizability as customisations to a desktop environment can prove to be risky if you haven’t done a study or research into your own usage patterns on your own desktop.
Budgie’s somewhat-more-locked-down-but-not-too-locked-down environment gives a sense of safety and clarity to my (and hopefully your) productivity environment.
Antorca 