Arkane Linux is an immutable distro based on Arch Linux featuring atomic system updates. It utilizes a custom toolkit called Arkdep to build, deploy and maintain a collection of deployments each one being a full Arkane Linux installation. If a new deployment has a bug or some other issues you can easily fall back to an older deployment, if an update were to somehow fail or be interupted no changes will be made to the system.
Arkane Linux is Arch-based, however the Arkdep toolkit is distro agnostic by design, as long as the Arkdep script receives a collection of Btrfs subvolume exports in the format it expects the system should work with virtually any distro. Imagine getting bored of Arch and deciding to just jump over to Debian using a single command without losing any data and while maintaining the ability to roll back to Arch again by simply rebooting back in to the old deployment.
I do have to clarify that the arkdep-build image building script right now only supports Arch-based distros. The arkdep deployment management script has however been tested with manually build images for distros such as Ubuntu, Debian and Elementary OS.
The story so far
Arkane started off with me exploring the Arch Linux build tools, once again impressed by the flexibility of Arch and its toolstack I quickly decided to take it further and mature this experiment in to a proper Arch Linux-based distro. And this is the point at which we are now, Arkane is taking shape nicely and nearing the beta stage.
It started off as an attempt at making a full rebuild of Arch for x86-64-v3, a hugely fun project but the scripts written for it were (knowingly, damn you Docker for breaking fakeroot at the wrong time!) written with major architectural flaws. A full revision of all work was required to which means effectively redoing the entire buildbot project.
Before I could seriously undergo this attempt at rewriting buildbot I started to think about immutability and its theoretical implementation. In theory implementing it should be trivial, so I attempted a manual configuration of such a setup and it was a huge success! After a couple of months of slowly writing Arkdep (initially named bttrfs, later Arkanium) I had all the basics implemented.
Now, November 2023, about 1 year after the start of the project, I have done a "release", the software is now in such a state that it should be stable. I have every intention to continue maintaining Arkane and Arkdep, but will anyone other than me ever actually use it? Only the future could tell.
The future
The current and only goal I will set is to persue the continued development and refinement of Arkane and Arkdep, and to stamp out any lingering bugs.
