Version 3 of the Arch Linux installer is out, with usability improvements and clarifications to its licensing.
Arch is one of the trickier Linux distros to get working, which is one reason it has a certain cachet to it – many of its users are proud of the fact that they got it working, and want to tell you.
The installation method that the excellent Arch wiki recommends is a multi-step manual process, and you may hear that Arch “doesn’t have an installation program.” In fact, it does: the Archinstall command, and version 3.0 appeared recently, closely followed by version 3.0.1 with over 20 minor fixes.
Archinstall 3 is still very basic and text-based. If you want a graphical live boot medium with a GUI installer, there are plenty of offshoot distros – we’ve looked at EndeavourOS and Garuda Linux among others. Even so, Archinstall is now easier than before. This release uses the curses library, meaning that its “TUI” (or Text User Interface) now lets you navigate the program using cursor keys! All right, it’s not the biggest or most radical change, but it’s helpful.
The Arch project has also refined its licensing. Following discussion in the project’s RFC 0040, the project adopted the 0BSD license. More formally known as Zero-Clause BSD, this is a permissive license that places minimal restrictions on users.
For clarity, this is not about the licenses on the actual software that constitutes the OS. As with any Linux distro, this comes from various separate sources and is covered by multiple licenses. This licensing change is about the scripts and configuration files that the Arch Linux maintainers use to create packages, notably its PKGBUILD system. If you want an in-depth analysis, Linux Weekly News subscribers can read its deep dive, which will be open to all on December 12.
This won’t make much difference to what last year’s Steam survey revealed – a growing number of Arch users – but it is good news for the multiple distros out there based on Arch.
Along with those we mentioned above, there are lots more, including Valve’s Steam OS 3, plus Manjaro Linux, the newer Cachy OS, and others. We suspect that Arch now has more derivative meta-distros than any Linux distribution except the Debian/Ubuntu family. ®
