Arch Linux

Last reviewed on 2026-05-13 Reference
In short
  • Arch Linux is a rolling-release, general-purpose distribution with a minimal base install.
  • It uses the pacman package manager and the binary repositories core, extra and multilib.
  • The Arch User Repository (AUR) is a community-curated collection of build recipes for software not in the official repositories.
  • The Arch Wiki is widely cited as a reference even by people who don't run Arch.

About the project

Arch Linux was launched in 2002 by Judd Vinet and has been maintained by a volunteer community ever since. The project's design centres on a small set of explicit principles, often referred to as "The Arch Way": simplicity (in the sense of having few moving parts, not necessarily of being easy to use), modernity, pragmatism, user centrality, and versatility. In practice this translates into a distribution that ships software close to upstream, makes few default choices for you, and assumes you are willing to read the manual.

Arch is general-purpose: it runs equally well as a desktop, a server and a development environment. It is not especially niche — it routinely appears in surveys of Linux user populations — but it does ask more of its users than Ubuntu or Fedora do.

Rolling-release model

Arch has no versioned releases. There is no "Arch 12" or "Arch 2026"; there is only "the current state of the repositories". New package versions are added as they become ready and reach you on the next system update. Installation media are produced monthly as a snapshot of the current state, but the system you boot from a recent installer is the same system you would have if you installed last year and ran pacman -Syu regularly.

The trade-off of this model is straightforward: you get new software very quickly, you also get changes very quickly. Reading the Arch Linux news page before a major upgrade is conventional — it's where manual-intervention notes are posted when an upcoming package needs human attention during the upgrade.

The package model

Arch's package manager, pacman, is fast and deliberately minimal. The standard commands are short:

sudo pacman -Syu             # synchronise repositories and upgrade everything
sudo pacman -S <package>     # install a package
sudo pacman -Rs <package>    # remove a package and unused dependencies
pacman -Ss <keyword>         # search the repositories
pacman -Q                    # list installed packages

Official binary packages live in three repositories:

  • core — the foundational packages required to build a working system.
  • extra — the bulk of available software, including desktop environments and applications.
  • multilib — 32-bit packages for 64-bit systems, useful for games and a handful of legacy applications.

(For some years there was also a community repository; it has since been merged into extra.)

The Arch User Repository (AUR)

The AUR is a community-curated collection of build recipes, not binary packages. Each AUR entry is a PKGBUILD file describing how to fetch source and build a package locally. AUR packages cover everything from niche utilities to proprietary software that can't be distributed in the official repositories.

Because AUR packages are built and installed from a third-party recipe, you should treat them with appropriate caution: read the PKGBUILD before using it, and stick to entries with active maintainers and recent updates. Helper tools such as paru and yay automate the build-and-install workflow, but they don't substitute for understanding what the recipe does.

Installation

Arch's installer is the command line. The installation walkthrough on the Arch Wiki takes you through partitioning, mounting, bootstrapping a base system with pacstrap, configuring the bootloader and choosing a desktop environment. A guided installer, archinstall, has been included on the official media for some time; it removes most of the manual steps but is not a substitute for understanding what the steps do, since you'll need that understanding to maintain the system afterwards.

Documentation: the Arch Wiki

The Arch Wiki is one of Arch's most lasting contributions to the wider Linux community. Pages cover everything from individual programs to broad topics like Wayland or systemd in considerable depth, and the explanations are often relevant on distributions other than Arch. Many of the links you'll find through general search results for Linux topics will point at it.

Pages are community-edited and occasionally inconsistent in style, but the wiki's overall accuracy is high, and it is one of the few project wikis where it's reasonable to follow the steps as written.

Where Arch fits

Arch suits users who:

  • Want recent software and are willing to deal with occasional upstream regressions.
  • Prefer to make the install-time choices themselves rather than inherit a distribution's defaults.
  • Are comfortable reading release notes before a big upgrade.
  • Don't mind the command line as a default interface for system administration.

It suits less well for users who want a system that updates itself in the background and never asks questions — Debian stable or an Ubuntu LTS is usually a better answer in that case.

Following the project

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