Arch Linux

i use arch, btw

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

• pacman, the simplest package manager with their community packages delivered pre-compiled binaries (see Command line: pacman)

• Arch Build System (ABS) is a build system to compile into appropriate package formats for pacman

• creating packages requires writing PKGBUILD for ABS

• 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 certain responsibilities with the AUR

• as of 2021-07-20, the official package set counts up to 13k packages; smaller compared to mainstream distros such as Debian ()

• Arch Linux does have an archive for the packages, bootstrap tarballs, and snapshots; it is only kept for a few years until they move into the historical archive

• the project is also involved in getting 100% Reproducible builds; you can see the progress from their reproducibility status page

• SteamOS 3.0 uses Arch Linux as its base