One of the more popular independent Linux distros.
Memed as the elit3 hacker's distro with its manual installation process and rolling release model creating an impression that requires active maintenance.
* Philosophies
- simplicity and pragmatism
- packages are in bleeding edge with a continuous update releases
- packages are delivered from upstream as-is with little configuration and sporadic patches
* Ecosystem
- [[https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman][pacman]], the simplest package manager with their community packages delivered pre-compiled binaries (see [[id:77f3ec38-9885-4f2b-8019-9042f0c6e4cb][Command line: pacman]])
- [[https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Build_System][Arch Build System]] (ABS) is a build system to compile into appropriate package formats for pacman
- creating packages requires writing [[https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD][PKGBUILD]] for ABS
- [[https://aur.archlinux.org][Arch User Repository]] (AUR) is a unsupported repository of packages with most of them being user-contributed package definitions;
while not official, it is integrated within the community;
it has a moderation group called Trusted Users (TUs) that carries out [[https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_Trusted_User_Guidelines][certain responsibilities with the AUR]]
- as of 2021-07-20, the [[https://archlinux.org/packages/][official package set]] counts up to 13k packages;
smaller compared to mainstream distros such as Debian ()
- Arch Linux does have an [[https://archive.archlinux.org/][archive]] for the packages, bootstrap tarballs, and snapshots;
it is only kept for a few years until they move into the [[https://archive.org/details/archlinuxarchive][historical archive]]
- the project is also involved in getting 100% [[id:fe9e21bc-3b38-4d0f-a785-253248a38ed7][Reproducible builds]];
you can see the progress from their [[https://reproducible.archlinux.org/][reproducibility status page]]