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Arctic is a Linux distribution built from source, managed declaratively. The machine is described in a file; a command makes the machine match the file. If an edit turns out to be wrong, you roll back to a numbered generation — from the shell, or from the boot menu if it will not boot.
It is not a fork of anything at the distribution level. The package
manager (alpm), the installer, the init scripts and the
ports tree were all written for it, specifically, from nothing. The
kernel is a genuine fork of Linux LTS with the ZEN patchset on top,
maintained as its own project.
Nothing here is a toy re-skin of Arch or Gentoo tooling wearing a different name. The install flow, the package format, the declarative layer and the boot-time generation switching are Arctic's own design, built to solve problems that came up while actually running this system — most of the "why" notes throughout these docs point at a real bug that was found and fixed, not a hypothetical.
/etc/arctic/install.conf |
what to install, read once by arctic-strap |
/etc/arctic/system.conf |
what the machine is, read by every arctic-rebuild |
alpm |
packages: install, remove, build from source, snapshot, roll back |
arctic-rebuild |
make the system match system.conf |
arctic rollback |
go back to an earlier generation |
arctic-shell |
a throwaway environment with packages in it, gone when you exit |
/run/arctic/boot.log |
what actually happened during the last boot, always |
Install covers getting it onto a machine. Declarative configuration covers everything after that, and is the part worth reading properly — it is what makes Arctic different from an ordinary source distribution. If something is not working, troubleshooting covers the real issues found and fixed while building this, with the actual root cause of each one rather than a generic checklist.
More: install · declarative configuration · generations and rollback · init systems · kernels · packages (alpm) · desktops and audio · networking · ephemeral shells · musl · building from source · troubleshooting · install.conf reference