As you might remember from my previous two posts from 2-3 months back (https://lemmy.ml/post/52307735 and https://lemmy.ml/post/53115847), I attempted to bring the way the Fedora Atomic desktops implement ostree or bootc to Arch Linux, combined with the CachyOS speed optimizations.

I did get a working proof-of-concept on the way, but ultimately after using it on both my PC and laptop, I decided Arch with an atomic filesystem just doesn’t feel like Arch anymore. Besides, there were some roadblocks that I just couldn’t fix by hand and would have had to resort to some serious vibecoding, which is where I drew the line.

Now, time to kick Plutonium-239 off of my PC again and go back to the drawing board. I asked myself if I want to replace it with stock Arch or with CachyOS. I prefer stock Arch, but while CachyOS is kinda bloated and opinionated, it does have some benefits, which is part of the reason why I wanted to make my own distro anyway.

Then I thought why not pivot my distro in a way that could perhaps be described as either “Stock Arch Linux with the speed and snapshot integration of CachyOS” or the other way around as “CachyOS but debloated and customizable like stock Arch Linux” if you will.

That’s where we are right now, ostree got replaced by a perfect Limine-BTRFS-Snapper setup, gone is the Calamares installer that locked you into KDE and replaced with a minimally patched archinstall and the CachyOS kernel is still compiled fresh and hosted on my own server.

I’ve been running the current version for a week now and I can confidently say that while I still have no talent for making a pretty website, I can now recommend you to run Plutonium-239 on your main PCs, not just on secondary laptops or VMs.

If you compare the comments on the last two posts with what I have implemented now, I hope that you notice that I take your voices seriously so truly: I would love to hear your feedback!

And to make this a little more fun, roast my desktop.