My plan is to have it on par, if not better than them. Currently I “only” (this is the biggest factor by far) provide the CachyOS kernel compiled by myself but I already differenciate myself by also compiling it for -v2 CPUs. All five microarchitectures have their dedicated repos up and working and I plan to ship all the packages that will boost speed by being compiled microarchitecture-specific.

I’m already building the server needed for that so compiling them automatically will be possible even while I’m on vacation next week.

That’s planned! Initially I actually planned to have a desktop selection in Calamares with KDE Plasma, GNOME and no DE, but while I was drafting the package lists for that I decided to push that back for a later release. This first one is more or less supposed to be a proof of concept so features like that are definitely in the works, but deemed overkill for the first version.

I don’t like black and white thinking and while I fucking hate LLMs in general, as 95% of times they are used for all the wrong reasons, I do have an Intel B70 for cases like these where current search engines just lead to nothing.

Haha, I feel honored to hear that! It’s still rough around the edges, so only use it if this isn’t your only PC. That said, I already use it on my Thinkpad and the only issue I myself encountered so far is that I had to use vscodium-electron-bin instead of vscodium-bin since it wanted to make a systemlink that caused the install to interrupt, otherwise it’s been smooth sailing so far.

You are right, I thought about that too late, but if you search it together with “linux” it already shows up!

Yeah, Linux distros using something like Discord always seemed very odd to me. I mean okay, if you cater to gamers then I guess it makes sense, but you won’t catch me doing that. Lemmy is the only social media I have anymore, the rest is just braindead and bot-infested.

No, you are pretty cool!

Yes, it does come preinstalled with KDE as implementing a proper desktop selection is planned but would take even more time. This is Arch however, you can uninstall everything you want. Throw KDE out and install whatever desktop enviornment you want, you still keep the kernel and the ostree update model, that’s what’s so cool about it!

Yeah, you are right, I’m not the best at explaining things, I’m sorry. I look at it like literally Arch but the updates are atomic. You can choose to install or uninstall whatever you want, but it gets written with an A/B system during updates so you can always have a fallback. It does come preconfigured from the start, because that was easier to develop for now, but you can treat this like any other Arch install, just with safer updates.

Thank you! I was wondering why noone has tried that yet and now I know why, but hey, it works now. I hope you will have fun with it!

Well, it were four 80 hour weeks and I “only” reverse-engineered the way Fedora makes their distro atomic with ostree but adapted to Arch. I did try to stay true to the Arch philosophy of keeping it minimal otherwise so it wasn’t that big of a project!

Edit: Sometimes I had to spin up Qwen 3.8 27B because the error codes the installer threw out were literally humanly unreadable so I had no clue what even went wrong but other than that it was by hand lmao

To put it in simple terms: when you update your system, you will have two deployments. One deployment stays exactly the same, the copy will be updated. Until you restart you stay on the original. When you restart, the system automatically attempts to boot the updated copy. If it fails, it automatically loads the original again.

That way the updates are atomic in the sense that you either boot into a fully updated system or simply back into the untouched original, nothing in between.

Edit: if you look up how Fedora Silverblue works, it’s pretty much the same, just applied to Arch!

I’m excited to hear your feedback! Keep in mind, some things might be buggy, but please notify me and they will be taken care of.

Hell yeah, let me know how it goes!

Thank you! In a perfect world I would have loved to name it “Arch Atomic”, but I’m not affiliated with them so I went for a wordplay on atomic with my favorite isotope!

There are a lot of benchmarks for the CachyOS kernel and it’s mostly single digit performance increases for “normal” tasks but a noticeably more snappy feeling. The mayor increases come in compiling or rendering workloads, there it can easily get into double digits. For example on my 270K, compiling this kernel takes 23 min with the stock linux kernel, 20 minutes with the linux-cachyos kernel in -v3.

Fuck apps, anything that can be done in a browser will be done in a browser for me

No offense taken, but I didn’t use btrfs snapshots in a minute and spent 200 hours in the last 18 days working on my distro with a little less than adequate sleep due to my ADHD keeping me awake, thinking about what to implement next. Please cut me some slack haha

True, if you set it up out of the box with CachyOS it rolls the entire disk back, but I forgot that option was a thing, my bad!

‘Oh come on!’ was my initial reaction, but I’ve read your website, and thought: ‘hey, that sounds nice!’

Haha, I know I know, yet another Arch-based distro in this economy, but I really feel like this does fill a gap, thank you for your interest!

On the other hand, perhaps the distros like this are meant to be installed by someone skilled to then be used mostly unattended by a regular user.

My aim is to make this both appealing for the normie who just wants to use it like “SteamOS but with CachyOS speed” and run Flatpaks on it AND for the more experienced user who wants all the benefits of Arch but with a little more peace of mind.

how would you know what’s a working state, so you need to return to the previous one?

As the website explains, it automatically falls back to the last working state if it doesn’t boot, but obviously it can’t detect if something is messed up but still booting like in your example. In that case you just reboot and manually select the last working state (wip but kinda working already) just like a BTRFS snapshot, BUT it only rolls back the system itself, NOT your files. A BTRFS snapshot will also roll back your documents or whatever so my system, when it’s stable and tested, will be superior in every way to BTRFS snapshots.