Arkane Linux lore

Custom Arch ISO

October 2022 - Januari 2023

Arkane started off with me exploring the Arch Linux build tools, initially Arkane was a simple customized Arch ISO with a GUI installer.

The first Arkane ISOs and installs were in configuration very similar to what Arkane still looks like today, a Fedora-esq default config, GNOME with all apps and features installed one would expect to have on a full featured desktop operating system, but nothing more than that.

x86-64-v3

Januari 2023 - April 2023

Yet this this quickly spiraled out of control in to attempting a full x86-64-v3 rebuild of Arch, this experiment got to the point of actually having the first bootable x86-64-v3 images, after which point I stopped development because the build tools were deeply flawed.

The build tools were flawed due to a bug in Docker, very shortly after I started development on the "buildbot" tool Docker bugged which broke fakeroot, yet I decided to go ahead with the project anyway and just work around this issue. The results were predictable, applications were build in a polluted environment causing some to pull in additional dependencies.

Immutability and atomicity

June 2023 - Today

I was always a fan of immutable distros, I have used Fedora Silverblue since its initial release, and still happily run it today. So I decided to give immutability a try.

First I evaluated existing tools, the most serious contender at the time being ABRoot. But it lacked documentation, I could not figure out how to use it, and I didn't feel like joining their Discord to ask them how it worked.

So I started thinking myself how an immutable could be implemented, I knew Btrfs had subvolumes, so I did a web search to see if it was possible to boot in to a subvolume. The answer was yes. I manually performed the deployment process, installing an Arch system in to a subvolume with pacstrap, I set up a bootloader entry for it, and everything worked as expected. Now all I had to do was write tooling to perform subvolume exports and deploy them.

From here on all the pieces just started to fall in place and everything was put in to code, any issues I encountered were trivial to solve, an immutable is surprisingly easy to implement. This tool would through a few names (Bttrfs, Arkanium) before eventually becoming Arkdep.