sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/myyc/vyy:latest

vyy

An ostree-based full fledged Arch Linux distribution, with no package manager. Basically Fedora Silverblue but with CachyOS’ Zen4 packages, because we all want that 1% performance improvement.

It’s a largely vibe coded attempt at essentially gerrymandering a standard GNOME-based Arch Linux setup into Fedora’s immutable system. And yes, it works perfectly in its current state.

This README isn’t written by an AI though so you can at least take it at face value.

Install Guide

GHCR – recommended but you kind of have to trust the ordeal

• Install Silverblue, or Kinoite, or Bazzite, or whatever

sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/myyc/vyy:latest

Reboot. bootc upgrade to update it. The kernel is signed so you can enable secure boot after trusting the key.

sudo mokutil --import /usr/share/vyy/secureboot.cer

Build it yourself

• Install Silverblue, or Kinoite, or Bazzite, or whatever
• Run scripts/dev.sh as root (yes, sorry).
• From there, run build-vyy-root.sh
• Commit to your ostree repo, deploy and reboot.

sudo ostree commit --repo=/ostree/repo \
--branch=vyy --owner-uid=0 --owner-gid=0 \
--subject="vyy YYYYMMDD" \
--skip-list=/path/to/vyy/config/ostree-skip-list \
/path/to/vyy/work
sudo ostree admin deploy vyy

You will lose out-of-the-box secure boot this way but you can create your own keys. As long as the paths are right the scripts will do it for you.

Is this even safe

The "install Silverblue" part is pretty much what makes this distro solid avoiding most possible sources of human error. Partitioning, encryption (if you want) and the bootloader are Fedora’s defaults, which should be more than enough for most people – Silverblue by default configures btrfs and has native encryption, so hooray.

This is also why you can use this sort of thing on relatively critical devices – I literally developed all of this on the only device I had access too, for work included. It doesn’t boot? Roll back and forget.

No package manager?

No package manager. The system is immutable. Want to add stuff? Fork and edit config/packages.conf. Or use distrobox. It’s included.

What’s under the hood?

The core thing is just a basic pacstrap setup with a bunch of packages added. You can see all of them in confg/packages.txt. The main build script doesn’t do much else, besides perhaps setting the locale.

Most of the hammering is done by restructure.sh which is invoked by build-vyy-root.sh so you might as well check that too since it runs within a rootful container.

Globally, it does a few things, e.g.:

• Building the initramfs with the ostree module (and others)
• Moving everything system inside /usr (including most of /etc)
• Ensuring the root is compatible with ostree
• Allowing sudo for wheel users (otherwise you’re locked out)
• Some sane defaults for pam (including the fingerprint)

Why depend on AUR packages?

So like ... it doesn’t actually depend on them yet. The only core one is bootc. If you want to build locally you don’t need it, you only need vanilla ostree. You don’t even need it if you want to update from your own ostree repo.

The other two packages are more of a personal convenience. They’re the Mullvad CLI and ibus-m17n which is required for certain input methods.

Why not NixOS at this point?

Fuck off