GitHub - myyc/vyy: ostree, arch linux, zen4, gnome. look ma, no package manager!

An ostree-based full fledged Arch Linux distribution, with no package manager. Basically Fedora Silverblue but with CachyOS' Zen4 packages, because we all want that 1% performance improvement.

It's a largely vibe coded attempt at essentially gerrymandering a standard GNOME-based Arch Linux setup into Fedora's immutable system. And yes, it works perfectly in its current state.

This README isn't written by an AI though so you can at least take it at face value.

Warning: This project is work-in-progress and even though it is very usable and stable it might miss some random stuff here and there.

Install Guide

GHCR – recommended but you kind of have to trust the ordeal

• Install Silverblue, or Kinoite, or Bazzite, or whatever

sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/myyc/vyy-zen4:latest

Reboot. bootc upgrade to update it. The kernel is signed so you can enable secure boot after trusting the key.

sudo mokutil --import /usr/share/vyy/secureboot.cer

There are no automated zen3 builds but you can build one yourself.

Build it yourself

• Install Silverblue, or Kinoite, or Bazzite, or whatever
• Run scripts/dev.sh zen3 as root (yes, sorry).
• From there, run build-vyy-root.sh zen3
• Commit to your ostree repo, deploy and reboot.

sudo ostree commit --repo=/ostree/repo \
    --branch=vyy --owner-uid=0 --owner-gid=0 \
    --subject="vyy YYYYMMDD" \
    --skip-list=/path/to/vyy/config/ostree-skip-list \
    /path/to/vyy/work
sudo ostree admin deploy vyy

You will lose out-of-the-box secure boot this way but you can create your own keys. As long as the paths are right the scripts will do it for you.

You could also use scripts/daily-build.sh and the systemd units if you have a server to run this on; edit the placeholders first though.

All the scripts default to zen4 but you can launch them with zen3 or generic as arguments. I haven't tested these two, but they should work.

Is this even safe

The "install Silverblue" part is pretty much what makes this distro solid avoiding most possible sources of human error. Partitioning, encryption (if you want) and the bootloader are Fedora's defaults, which should be more than enough for most people – Silverblue by default configures btrfs and has native encryption, so hooray.

This is also why you can use this sort of thing on relatively critical devices – I literally developed all of this on the only device I had access too, for work included. It doesn't boot? Roll back and forget.

The deployed system keeps your /etc and, slightly less intuitively, your kernel parameters, even though they're nowhere besides /proc. If you want to edit them the process is a bit of a leap of faith since there is no rpm-ostree. Assuming you're in your latest build (i.e. not something that will be overwritten on reboot), you need to edit your current build's entry in /boot/loader/entries, reboot, and then whichever update will use the new parameters as a base.

No package manager?

No package manager. The system is immutable. Want to add stuff? Fork and edit config/packages.conf. Or use distrobox. It's included.

What's under the hood?

The core thing is just a basic pacstrap setup with a bunch of packages added. You can see all of them in confg/packages.txt. The main build script doesn't do much else, besides perhaps setting the locale.

Most of the hammering is done by restructure.sh which is invoked by build-vyy-root.sh so you might as well check that too since it runs within a rootful container.

Globally, it does a few things, e.g.:

• Building the initramfs with the ostree module (and others)
• Moving everything system inside /usr (including most of /etc)
• Ensuring the root is compatible with ostree
• Allowing sudo for wheel users (otherwise you're locked out)
• Some sane defaults for pam (including the fingerprint)

Why depend on AUR packages?

So like ... it doesn't actually depend on them yet. The only core one is bootc. If you want to build locally you don't need it, you only need vanilla ostree. You don't even need it if you want to update from your own ostree repo.

The other packages are more of a personal convenience. They're the Mullvad CLI, ibus-m17n which is required for certain input methods, and raw-thumbnailer.

Why not NixOS at this point?

Fuck off