Arios is basically a respin of Ubuntu, with no repository of its own. It chiefly differs in offering the Gnome desktop and a customised Arios one; it’s therefore very similar to Pinguy. But it comes from Iran, and so has excellent support for the Persian language.

The website warns that a few computers may boot to a blank grey screen, which happened to me, but the solution is simple. Once the live session is running one can use the standard installer, Ubiquity. As is often the case, this will lock-up if you try to encrypt /home.

The selection of software is generous: LibreOffice, Firefox & Chromium, Thunderbird & Geary, Xchat, Pidgin, Choqok, Gimp, Mypaint, Inkscape, Shotwell, Audacious & Rhythmbox, Audacity, Cheese, Openshot, Totem & VLC & Smplayer! Of these, only Choqok, Audacity, Rhythmbox, and Totem left warnings when run from the CLI, but Audacious wouldn’t run at all. You also get Wine, Virtualbox, and dial-up internet. Codecs are installed and work perfectly, even on my ‘mp4 from hell’, but the Flash plugin has to be installed using a tool on the desktop. Unlike Ubuntu, Arios accepted my USB speakers. This was the first distro I’ve used that defaults to zsh rather than bash. For some reason, Arios seems a little bloated — it’s larger than Pinguy and even OpenSUSE — so 1GB is advisable.

If you like Ubuntu but prefer Gnome 3 to Unity, this probably has the edge on Pinguy.