Who It's For
A small independent project: a considered Hyprland desktop on Arch for one person's machine, kept legible enough that yours can be the second.
It suits you if
- You want Arch with a working, opinionated Hyprland desktop on the first boot, instead of assembling one over a weekend.
- You are comfortable with a keyboard-driven desktop built from small tools, with menus (fuzzel) rather than a settings application.
- You like knowing what is installed and why. Configuration is plain files under
~/.config, merged rather than overwritten when the defaults change, and the reasoning is written down in the project's decision log. - You want bootable Btrfs snapshots and a way back from a bad update, including from a system that no longer boots.
- You want packages from Arch's repositories plus a short, reviewed list of AUR packages, with no AUR helper and no third-party binary repository.
It probably doesn't suit you if
- You want a full desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE, with a settings application for everything. Sobarch has menus for audio, network, Bluetooth, displays and a few more, and expects you to edit config files for the rest.
- You need a fixed, long-lived release. Sobarch follows Arch's rolling updates. The monthly ISO is an installer, not a stable platform.
- You need to install offline. Packages are downloaded, and vendored AUR packages are built, during the install.
- You need mandatory access control or sandboxing. There is no AppArmor and no sandboxing of installed software; see Trust & Verification.
- You manage a fleet. Unattended and PXE installs exist, but this is not an enterprise product and has no support commitment.
What is still best-effort
- NVIDIA. Driver selection is based on the card's generation, but it has not been verified against real NVIDIA hardware.
- Dual-boot and T2 Macs. Both are supported and work, but they are covered by far fewer machines than a plain single-OS install.
- Anything with a small user base. Unusual hardware is more likely to hit a problem nobody has reported yet.
sobarch doctorand an issue report are how those get fixed.
Where to start
Install it from the signed prebuilt ISO, or from a stock Arch ISO. If something is unclear or breaks, the FAQ and Troubleshooting are the first stops.