When comparing Netrunner vs Chakra, the Slant community recommends Netrunner for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for KDE Plasma 5?” Netrunner is ranked 24th while Chakra is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose Netrunner is:
Works well. Very similar to my experiance with Manjaro.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Everything works well out of the box
Works well. Very similar to my experiance with Manjaro.
Pro Beautiful and faithful KDE implementation
Modified but not overly tweaked (like BlueStar Linux or Ka OS).
Pro nice feel
Pro Always up-to-date
The "rolling" edition of Netrunner is based on Manjaro (an Arch derivative) which offers a semi-rolling release.
Pro Quick & lightweight
Surprisingly snappy for a fairly fully-featured distro.
Pro Netrunner Core is ideal for workstation
Netrunner Core is a vanilla version based on Debian Stable that only uses 400 MB RAM.
Pro Focuses on KDE/Qt Apps
comes with none GTK apps per default
Pro Independent from Arch
its not just another Arch Spin-off
Pro Keeps Gnome apps tidier even than Gnome distros
Cons
Con Very heavy on resources
The heaviest Linux distro I've ever used. It often gets my laptop fan to fly.
Con Weak base
Sometimes updates will not execute hooks(full update always misses to run mkinitcpio) so you get an unbootable system.
Con Small development team
The team is very small
Con No real installer
Has no installer just a big bloated LiveCD that gets unpacked to your disk.
Con Pacman
Compared to deb or rpm it takes ages to update the system, it's also very dumb in dependency tracking.
Con Unreliable Servers
The CCR or the community forums are often down or unreachable.
Con Overwrites your default EFI config
It overwrites your default EFI config wich can make you PC unbootable if something goes wrong.
Con Uses systemd
Which is very hard to debug and not a *nix standard.
Con Only available for x86-based CPUs
Con Wont let you install the system to USB drives
Chakras weak installer Calamares does not allow you to install it to a USB drive.
Con Weak update process to a recent release
For example, you can install the Goedel Release and update it to the current release which then fails to boot due to some systemd-errors.
