The installer is keyboard-driven: light, fast, and simple. It’s a lot quicker and easier than a normal Arch installation. It doesn’t offer encryption. The developer recommends the ArchBang installation guide.

At the first boot, a script is run that sets up the package manager pacman, and then offers to install updates, bluetooth, broadcom, media codecs, LibreOffice, and CUPS. Most users will then want to add spell checking and a graphical package tool. Surely printer support and a spell checker should be on the installation disk?

The programs installed on the 32-bit Xfce disk that I tested were Chromium, Abiword, Gnumeric, Thunderbird, Exaile, VLC, Shotwell, and Gimp. Apart from minor warnings from Gimp, Chromium, and Exaile when run from the CLI, all were sound, as were the media codecs once installed. I was surprised to see that sudo works without asking for a password! This is a very light implementation of Xfce: at a pinch it would run in 192MB.

I was able to get my USB speakers to work (unlike in some Debian derivatives) by creating ~/.asoundrc, but I could’t get gtk to use xim (not something that would trouble most people).

If you want the cutting-edge, rolling-release distro that is Arch, but without spending a whole afternoon setting it up, Bridge is for you.