Warning
This is currently in the very early stages of development and things are likely to change significantly. This includes what utilities are included by default. Right now this is mainly only intended for my personal use, though I plan to slowly clean it up and make it easier to maintain more broadly.
This is an opinionated bootc image based made using mkosi, specifically using this template. A relatively lightweight setup with the sway window manager. I use this alongside my dotfiles.
Much like upstream Arch, Amethyris aims to push out packages quickly with minimal additional patches so your system is always up-to-date and shipping software that functions in line with the original developers' intentions. Images build daily and little is included on the image that could easily be obtained some other way (for example, brew or flatpak). An emphasis is placed on "do-it-yourself"; only minimal dotfiles are included and all are free to be modified.
Currently, there is no image for the Nvidia proprietary drivers or for any window manager other than sway (the open source Nouveau / NVK stack is included instead for Nvidia graphics cards). I am willing to provide options for these things only if others are willing to commit to maintaining them long-term. Alternatively, you could fork this repository and make it use whatever you want and maintain it entirely yourself.
Image updates are deployed using bootc. Instead of updating individual packages (ideally simultaneously!) using pacman, bootc will load an image that was built from scratch with the new versions of all the baseline software and deploy it to your system. This has pros and cons, but generally results in a more stable system long-term that requires less maintenance. Unlike regular Arch for example, updating after leaving your laptop unused for 2 months won't result in "manual intervention is required" and the risk of a broken system if you mess up. The old image will simply be seamlessly swapped out with the new when you next reboot. On the flip side, you can't simply pacman -S [app] but don't worry - there are still plenty of ways to install things.
The default GUI file manager is Thunar. A few others such as Dolphin are available as flatpaks.
Feel free to grab your favourite editor from brew. Nano and vim are included on the image; other terminal-based editors like neovim or helix or micro are easy enough to get. For GUI-based editors see Universal Blue's homebrew tap which has VS Code and Jetbrains Toolbox among others. Other editors may need to be installed more manually.
The default terminal is kitty, but I may end up changing this to foot as it is a more basic default. Most terminals work fine as an AppImage or even a flatpak, and some also offer support for a local installation in ~/.local/share.
Other apps should be installed using brew, flatpak or a tarball. If none of these are suitable, you can try distrobox which is also included on the image, or you can make your own image in order to add it. While I am willing to entertain suggestions for new default utilities, most are likely to be rejected.
Likely never. Arch's rolling nature makes this incredibly annoying to do; this would require us to switch over to building each image with the latest archive for one to stop links from 404ing. That could cause issues with third-party repositories. Partial updates from using -Sy and layered system updates with -Syu are not reasonable to support either. And even on distros like Fedora which don't have these issues, tools like rpm-ostree have proven to be unreliable.
Sysexts are however potentially in scope for popular utilities that I do not want to make a part of a base image. You can make your own, too, just bear in mind you are responsible for maintaining them.
Feel free to use it in a distrobox if you are diligent enough to actually use it responsibly. Support will not be added to the base image largely for the same reasons as layering.