News archives

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The latest weekly ISOs have been promoted to official installation media.

Notable changes: LXQt and LXDE were dropped from the community editions; XFCE was made default DE in community-gtk.

Please report anything out of the ordinary to the related forum announcement thread.

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A backup package archive (located in the US) has just gone online, to address connectivity issues reported by some of our users.

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TL;DR: Upgrade your systems NOW!

Following the related OpenWall post:
The upstream tarballs of xz 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 contain a backdoor which uses liblzma as a means to compromise SSH servers.

Preliminary analysis from the aforementioned post shows that the backdoor is designed to exploit openssh when linked against libsystemd (which depends on lzma) to compromise the SSH services. Artix and Arch don't link openssh to liblzma and thus this attack vector is not possible.

Based on the same analysis, the execution of openssh under systemd is a prerequisite for the backdoor to activate and given the additional distance of Artix to systemd (aren't we glad?), the exploit shouldn't affect any running Artix system.

However, it is strongly advised that all Artix users and administrators out there immediately upgrade their systems and container images (or at least xz to version 5.6.1-2) and restart openssh. Versions of xz up to and including 5.4.1-1 are not affected.

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The server is back online, all systems nominal.

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Due to a server malfunction, multiple Artix services are unavailable. Among them:

• Gitea
• Archive
• Galaxy repository

Unless it's a very serious hardware problem, it should be fixed sometime on Monday.

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Following the related Arch announcement

With shadow >= 4.14.0, Artix Linux's default password hashing algorithm changed from SHA512 to yescrypt.

Furthermore, the umask settings are now configured in /etc/login.defs instead of /etc/profile.

This should not require any manual intervention.

Reasons for Yescrypt
The password-based key derivation function (KDF) and password hashing scheme yescrypt has been chosen due to its adoption (readily available in libxcrypt, which is used by pam) and its stronger resilience towards password cracking attempts over SHA512.

Although the winner of the Password Hashing Competition has been argon2, this even more resilient algorithm is not yet available in libxcrypt (attempt one, attempt two).

Configuring yescrypt
The YESCRYPT_COST_FACTOR setting in /etc/login.defs is currently without effect, until pam implements reading its value. If a YESCRYPT_COST_FACTOR higher (or lower) than the default (5) is needed, it can be set using the rounds option of the pam_unix module (i.e. in /etc/pam.d/system-auth).

General list of changes

• yescrypt is used as default password hashing algorithm, instead of SHA512
• pam honors the chosen ENCRYPT_METHOD in /etc/login.defs and does not override the chosen method anymore
• changes in the filesystem (>= 2023.09.18) and pambase (>= 20230918) packages ensure, that umask is set centrally in /etc/login.defs instead of /etc/profile

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Following the related Arch migration announcement, our repository structure has changed accordingly. The [gremlins] repository has split into [system-gremlins] and [world-gremlins]; likewise, the [goblins] repository has split into [system-goblins] and [world-goblins]. The [galaxy] repository has been merged into [world].

How are end users affected?
Those who don't use testing ([-gremlins]) and staging ([-goblins]) repositories won't see any difference; those who do, will have to enable [system-gremlins] and [world-gremlins] manually.

The Universe repository
All packages from this repository have been moved to the replaced galaxy repository. As a result, those who have the universe repository enabled in pacman.conf should remove it and add galaxy.
Another change is that the [-bin] packages have been removed, as these can be built locally. Also, librewolf had to be dropped due to critical build issues that occur since the last two versions.

The omniverse repo will remain as it was and is, though some of its packages will be moved to the galaxy and world repositories.

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Following the related Arch migration announcement, our repository structure has changed accordingly. The [gremlins] repository has split into [system-gremlins] and [world-gremlins]; likewise, the [goblins] repository has split into [system-goblins] and [world-goblins]. The [galaxy] repository is in the process of merging into [world].

How are end users affected?
Those who don't use testing ([-gremlins]) and staging ([-goblins]) repositories won't see any difference; those who do, will have to enable [system-gremlins] and [world-gremlins] manually. The updated /etc/pacman.conf will roll out of [system-gremlins] once our new layout and updated developer tools are sufficiently tested.

The unused repositories will remain active, but empty, until the transition is complete. In general, most users shouldn't notice much except for a short period of diminished updates, as packaging has frozen for the duration of the migration. Please report any issues at our forum.

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Our primary US mirror will be taken offline today (16 March 2023) at 16:00 UTC+1 for scheduled maintainance, which is expected to last no more than 2 hours. Please use the other mirrors listed in the download page until its operation continues.

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After extensive testing and debugging, our latest weekly ISOs have acquired official installation media status.
Please report anything out of the ordinary to our forum announcement thread.

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Our debuginfod service is up and running at https://debuginfod.artixlinux.org.

Read the mailing list announcement for more details.

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New official installation media are available at our download section.

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As more and more packages are available through our repositories, we decided to move artix-archlinux-support to the [universe] repository. This package provides virtual systemd dependencies and Arch repository entries in /etc/pacman.conf. New users who wish to use Arch-provided packages, especially from [community], should:

1. Enable the [universe] repository
2. Install artix-archlinux-support and follow the post-install instructions

Existing users who have already enabled the Arch repositories are not affected.

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Support for the 66 init system (also called suite66 here) has officially been retired.

The primary reasons are the lack of maintainership (the previous 66 maintainer stepped down) and the significant overlap with other init systems. For now, all suite66 packages have been moved to the [universe] repository where they will remain for some unspecified period of time before being removed completely.
Current 66 users are encouraged to switch to another init as soon as possible with s6 being the recommended choice for those who want something similar. Check the Wiki for a brief guide on switching init systems.

Follow this announcement on our forum.

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The latest ffmpeg-2:5.0-3 was accidentally pulled earlier than intended from our staging ([goblins]) repository. If you haven't upgraded yet and use stuff with ffmpeg dependencies from the Arch repositories, refrain from upgrading for now.

If you have already upgraded, you can either downgrade to the status-quo ante, using the Artix and Arch package archives or install ffmpeg4.4 from [galaxy] (easier). sudo pacman -Sy --asdeps ffmpeg4.4 or, if you get dependency errors sudo pacman -Sy --asdeps ffmpeg ffmpeg4.4
All affected packages in our own repositories have already rebuilt against the new ffmpeg, so ffmpeg4.4 should only be needed until Arch rolls its own packages out of [staging].

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After extensive testing and bug squashing, we are pleased to announce new stable ISO releases.

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A new init system, dinit, has left testing and entered the weekly downloads section. Should you decide to try it out, please report your findings to our new forum board.

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To accommodate for the wishes of the users who expressed their preference to have pamac and octopi provided by Artix, these have now been added to the - not officially supported - universe repository.
A clear warning and disclaimer are displayed when installing or upgrading these packages:
>>> THIS TOOL IS NOT SUPPORTED BY ARTIX (NOR BY ARCH) THE USE OF AUR HELPERS CAN RESULT IN A BROKEN SYSTEM MAKE SURE TO HAVE A VALID BACKUP FIRST AND USE AT YOUR OWN RISK
Related forum discussion.

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Due to major issues occurring for users as a result of using some AUR helpers, it has been decided to remove Pamac and Octopi from our repositories.
We know some users liked using these tools, but unfortunaly the havoc they keep creating outweighs their benefits.

Join the discussion on the forum.
https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,3186.0.html

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The upcoming s6-base 2.0-1 and s6-scripts 20210921-1 packages introduce a couple of major new features for s6 users.

First, the /etc/s6/adminsv directory is supported for writing custom s6-rc services.
Additionally, network detection for services on startup is now supported via editing the new network bundle.

For complete details, see the full announcement post on the forums.
https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,3064.0.html

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If you happened to use the USER variable for autologging into agetty, this variable has been removed and replaced with ARGS in the upcoming s6-scripts update. Any arbitrary argument can be passed instead. In the new *.conf file instead of: USER="username" it becomes: ARGS="-a username"
Currently s6-scripts is in testing, but it will make its way to stable soon.

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Artix has reached the stage where it can operate without the help of the Arch repositories, including the preparation of its installation media. As such, all new weekly ISO images will ship without [extra], [community] and [multilib] enabled in pacman.conf. Existing setups will not be affected, but new users may want to enable them and benefit from the additional packages. Instructions are provided in our wiki.

TL;DR: # pacman -Syu artix-archlinux-support

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Some *-s6 service scripts have files named "conf" within their service directory (/etc/s6/sv/service/conf).
With the latest upgrade, the location of such files have been moved to /etc/s6/config/package.conf
If you have made custom edits to the conf files, pacman will leave them in the /etc/s6/sv/service directories and append a .pacsave to the files.

It is recommended to copy any changes you made to the original conf files over to the new ones and delete the old .pacsave files as soon as possible to avoid any issues should you remove the service in the future with pacman.

Additionally, do not blindly overwrite a new conf file with an old .pacsave one since it is not guaranteed these are exactly the same. Apologies for the inconvenience.

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The upgrade has been completed. Upstream bandwidth has been quadrupled to 400Mbits/s. Thanks to each and everyone who has supported us!

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An upgrade is scheduled for our primary download server, located in the USA. A short downtime is expected and in the meantime the official ISO images will be available through our mirrors.
The weekly ISO images will only be accessible through our own secondary mirrors in Germany:
Artix EU mirror #1
Artix EU mirror #2

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A runit service manager cli tool has been added in our repositories, as a helper to runit init system.
Install it with:
# pacman -S rsm

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Due to changes in our tools, the displaymanager-openrc package will be retired. There are replacement packages currently in the gremlins repos. Each DM has now its own openrc package, which brings openrc's DM setup in line with runit and s6 counterparts.

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We are pleased to announce new stable ISO releases.

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The images are available for downloading in the testing section of our download area.
Report any issues or find further information at our forum threads for i3 and Gnome respectively.

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A package archive of our repositories went operational a few days ago, useful for downgrading packages to previous versions.
The archived packages can be accessed either alphabetically or by date, in a manner identical to the Arch Linux Archive, except of course for replacing the domain name.

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Qt 5.15 breaks the GTK2 theming support provided by qt5-styleplugins, which affects the dark theming of Qt5 apps in existing Artix installations.
Users may have to edit their configurations and set the QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE variable, usually defined in /etc/environment to "qt5ct-style" or "kvantum-dark" in order to fix their applications appearance.
The latest qt5-styleplugins in [galaxy] (version 5.0.0.20170311-22) fixes the issue.

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New XFCE ISOs are available for downloading and testing in the weekly download section. As such, they are still considered testing; please report any issues at our forum.

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The nss and lib32-nss packages prior to version 3.51.1-1 were missing a soname link each. This has been fixed in 3.51.1-1, so the upgrade will need to overwrite the untracked files created by ldconfig. If you get any of these errors nss: /usr/lib/p11-kit-trust.so exists in filesystem lib32-nss: /usr/lib32/p11-kit-trust.so exists in filesystem when updating, use pacman -Syu --overwrite /usr/lib\*/p11-kit-trust.so to let the upgrade continue.

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After a 2-month period of testing and bug hunting, we are pleased to offer new official installation media.
In addition to base ISOs, this time we provide more desktop-specific images to choose from, for faster ready-for-use installations. Enjoy!

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If you are using OpenSSH it is necessary to restart the sshd daemon after the update to 8.2p1-1.
This was reported at the Arch Linux bug tracker: FS#65517 - [openssh] upgrade to 8.2p1-1 breaks logins

How-to:

OpenRC

rc-service sshd restart

Runit

sv restart sshd

s6

s6-rc -d change sshd s6-rc -u change sshd

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When updating either one of these, you will see a message like this below. Warning: this update will restart your service. This may kill your graphical session. Save your work before proceeding. Press 'ctrl+\' to quit the update. Press 'ctrl+c' to continue. If you quit, you need to manually remove the /var/lib/pacman/db.lck file. Before proceeding, be absolutely sure you are okay with temporarily killing your graphical session. Press 'ctrl+c' to continue and then manually execute the s6-rc-db-update-hook script.. # sh /usr/share/libalpm/scripts/s6-rc-db-update-hook You will have to do this for both dbus-s6 and elogind-s6. After those are done, you can proceed with your regular update. # pacman -Syu

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For s6 users, updating to s6-linux-init-1.0.3.1-5 will hit some file conflicts and require manual intervention. This will first be required for [gremlins] and then [system] later. If you want to save any changes made to s6-linux-init scripts first, # cp -r /etc/s6/current/scripts /tmp Then remove the current directory and reinstall s6-linux-init # rm -rf /etc/s6/current # pacman -Syu s6-linux-init If you backed up your s6-linux-init scripts, you can move them back. # cp -r /tmp/scripts /etc/s6/current Now, it is safe to boot and shutdown the system again.

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New Artix ISO images, marked testing have been uploaded to our main download server.
The base ISOs only offer a bare minimum system, installable from the console, and are meant for people who want to setup their systems from the ground up.
The minimal ISOs come with a basic DE (LXDE, LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE and KDE/Plasma), with a few basic applications and slightly preconfigured for uniform GTK/Qt look. The graphics installer of choice is Calamares and provides a basic working desktop.
All ISOs come in 3 versions with our officially supported init systems. Read the forum announcement and post your feedback there or in our Telegram group.

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p>During pacman update when you hit this message: looking for conflicting packages... :: python-pyqt5 and pyqt5-common are in conflict. Remove pyqt5-common? [y/N] error: unresolvable package conflicts detected error: failed to prepare transaction (conflicting dependencies) :: python-pyqt5 and pyqt5-common are in conflict when updating, use: pacman -Rdd pyqt5-common && pacman -Syu to perform the upgrade.

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In the process of Xorg cleanup the update requires manual intervention when you hit this message: :: installing xorgproto (2019.2-2) breaks dependency 'inputproto' required by lib32-libxi :: installing xorgproto (2019.2-2) breaks dependency 'dmxproto' required by libdmx :: installing xorgproto (2019.2-2) breaks dependency 'xf86dgaproto' required by libxxf86dga :: installing xorgproto (2019.2-2) breaks dependency 'xf86miscproto' required by libxxf86misc when updating, use: pacman -Rdd libdmx libxxf86dga libxxf86misc && pacman -Syu to perform the upgrade.

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We are pleased to announce that, after a moderate period of testing, the s6 process supervision suit has come out of [gremlins].
People willing to install (or convert to) this init system, are encouraged to read the upstream documentation and related posts in our forum. Most s6 service init files are also provided in [world] and [galaxy].

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A fresh base ISO image (i.e. no desktop or graphical installer) featuring OpenRC has been uploaded to our servers.

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A QT-based ISO featuring the KDE Plasma and LXQt desktop environments and a GTK-based ISO with MATE and LXDE are available for downloading. Both ISO images come equipped and ready for general use (multimedia, office, internet, productivity), offering the latest software available and are, despite their general DE/toolkit orientation, preconfigured for completely uniform look between QT and GTK applications, allowing for aesthetically pleasing integration of the best apps from both worlds. Read the forum announcement for more information and screenshots.

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2 new ISO images, marked community and featuring the MATE desktop, are available for downloading. Read the forum announcement for more information.

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The latest elogind (241.1-1), and specifically libelogind, provides the necessary ABI function calls and headers that allow software to be directly linked against it, meaning that applications built against libsystemd can be used with libelogind as drop-in replacement. This also means that /usr/lib/libsystemd.so can be just a symlink to /usr/lib/libelogind.so and nobody will notice.

Users running on [gremlins] might experience breakage with upstream Arch packages that are linked against systemd-libs, at least until our mirrors are all fully in sync. If you encounter problems, please report them at the forum.

The systemd-dummy and systemd-libs-dummy packages will be dropped, once the new elogind moves to [system].

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Thanks to a very generous donation from Brecht-Schule Hamburg, an AMD Epyc 7281 (16-core/32-thread) bare-metal server with 32GB of RAM is being prepared for taking over the package building needs of Artix. The server's purchase cost was covered by Brecht-Schule, which is also hosting it at their premises in Hamburg, Germany. Thank you!

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A new OpenRC/LXQt ISO, marked gremlins is available for downloading. It's considered testing, please report any problems to our forum.

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The good, old logo from 2017 is a part of history. Our new logo is now official.

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Artix is resuming normal workflow.

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We advise users to temporarily disable Arch and other repositories to prevent errors.

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After extensive testing, we've moved from gremlins to release ISOs. You can get both OpenRC and runit flavours from Sourceforge.

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2 new LXQt ISOs (OpenRC and runit) are available at Sourceforge.

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The people at the Czech Technical University in Prague will be moving their entire infrastructure into new facilities in the week between 23 and 30 September 2018.

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Our PKGBUILDs are now hosted on our own GIT server.

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This procedure will be necessary in [gremlins] first, later in [system]. All commands below must be run as root.

First, make sure your system has an up-to-date mirrorlist. Some mirrors have stopped syncing since our primary mirror went offline for a few days. The 3 mirrors on top in the latest mirrorlist are known to sync fully.

Compare your mirrors with the ones below: Server = https://mirror.clarkson.edu/artix-linux/repos/$repo/os/$arch Server = https://ftp.sh.cvut.cz/artix-linux/$repo/os/$arch Server = https://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/linux/artixlinux/$repo/os/$arch

Runit

Manually remove runlevel and sysvinit symlinks: # rm /etc/runit/runsvdir/default/{dbus,elogind} # rm /usr/bin/{init,poweroff,shutdown,halt,reboot} Then proceed with system update: # pacman -Syu artix-sysvcompat

OpenRC

Remove elogind and dbus from their runlevels: # rc-update del elogind boot # rc-update del dbus default Then proceed with system update, making sure openrc is also updated: # pacman -Syu artix-sysvcompat # pacman -S --needed openrc

If you updated before you saw this announcement, there is still hope.

Help your kernel find the new init binary, by providing it manually at the GRUB command line: init=/usr/bin/openrc-init or init=/usr/bin/runit-init Then proceed as described in the respective sections above.

Read the discussion at the forum for more information.

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We are in need of a new (and really stable) main mirror and multiple secondary mirrors located around the world. The primary mirror will have to rsync at regular intervals from our build server (every 30 minutes or so) and the secondary mirrors will in turn rsync from the primary mirror somewhat less frequently. Good bandwidth and at least 30 GBs of disk space (for now, we will need more in the future) is what we currently need. Please contact us if you can provide such a server or know someone who can.

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Get it from our mirrors.

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We are moving our package repos away from Sourceforge hosting, main reason being the restriction of colon characters (':') in filenames, which breaks the package database with epoch-versioned packages.
Edit your /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist with your favourite editor and make sure the following mirrors are on top: Server = http://mirror1.artixlinux.org/repos/$repo/os/$arch Server = http://artix.wheaton.edu/repos/$repo/os/$arch/ Server = http://mirror.strits.dk/artix-linux/repos/$repo/os/$arch Server = https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/artix-linux/repos/$repo/os/$arch Server = https://www.uex.dk/repos/artix/repos/$repo/os/$arch Then run: pacman -Syu to get the latest package databases and update.

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After more than two years of maintaining repositories with OpenRC packages, the maintainers of separate but closely or loosely related projects (Arch-OpenRC, Manjaro-OpenRC) decided to join forces and create a project that would be systemd-free and unaffected from upstream changes and updates. That required what might technically be considered as a mini-fork. Three new repositories, [system], [world] and [galaxy] have been created which must be placed before the official Arch or Manjaro ones. This ensures that upstream (if this term can be used anymore) will never break the new setup.

The [arch-openrc] and [arch-nosystemd] repos will stop being updated. Manjaro-OpenRC will also stop being supported in a couple of months.

Existing OpenRC systems (whether arch-openrc or manjaro-openrc) can be converted to the new scheme with minimal effort. Older eudev-openrc ones might need some more tweaking, especially with concern to the desktop: consolekit2 is replaced by elogind. Those with vanilla systemd Arch or Manjaro must first migrate as described. Or, you can install a fresh Artix system.

Our sources are hosted at github/artix-linux