Manjaro Immutable Out Now for Community Testing – Releases

Here is a simple series of actions you can perform to touch upon most major user-facing functionally.

• 32GB of storage minimum, 64GB or more recommended
• UEFI boot

Download the live ISO and simply install it using the graphical installer. Watch this short video to see how you can try it out with vanilla QEMU:

If you have just installed Manjaro Immutable it should say there are no updates available. If it does update, give the machine a reboot when it completes.

sudo arkdep deploy

It should print a nice diff on upgraded (Or downgraded), new and removed packages.

# If an update is available for the default variant will compare current version to new version
arkdep diff

# Compare current version to another image variant
arkdep diff test-manjaro-kde

Note that after switching it will still default to the GNOME version when updating. To make test-manjaro-kde the default branch you will have to change repo_default_image in /arkdep/config.

sudo arkdep deploy test-manjaro-kde

Reboot the system to boot in to the new KDE deployment.

Find the GNOME image ID, it will be the second item in the list, the items are in order of installation;

cat /arkdep/tracker
8da5433c34d8633d686c0c6cdc8b0d7d0c77d0d5f7
1b07985e7fd28c5722f73ed6937b0c6afedfba33d6 <--- This one

Use systemd-boot bootctl to change the default booted image.

sudo bootctl set-default 1b07985e7fd28c5722f73ed6937b0c6afedfba33d6

Now reboot, it should reboot back in to the GNOME deployment.

Find the KDE image ID, it will be the first item in the list;

cat /arkdep/tracker
8da5433c34d8633d686c0c6cdc8b0d7d0c77d0d5f7 <--- This one
1b07985e7fd28c5722f73ed6937b0c6afedfba33d6

Now remove it;

sudo arkdep remove 8da5433c34d8633d686c0c6cdc8b0d7d0c77d0d5f7

# It can work with an impartial version definition also
sudo arkdep remove 8d

For fun and giggles try also removing your currently active GNOME deployment, it should not allow it;

sudo arkdep remove 1b07985e7fd28c5722f73ed6937b0c6afedfba33d6

One of the primary differences between Arkdep and other immutable solutions is its ease of use, it was purposefully build to make it as easy as possible for other people build personalized configurations for either themselves or a community with a specific use case or preference.

Arkdep is a simple shell script script only dependent on a few GNU Coreutils, Bash, Btrfs, wget, curl and Systemd. To utilize it you require no dedicated infrastructure, no weird dependencies and no magic.

Images are build by an image provider, this could be you building images for yourself or a distro which prebuilds and tests images before releasing these to a wider community.

These images are uploaded to a simple HTTP repository and downloaded by Arkdep. Alternatively, self-made images can also be deployed entirely locally directly from Arkdep’s cache.

The downloaded images are exported Btrfs subvolumes, they will be imported by Arkdep and made bootable by configuring a bootloader entry for it to mount said subvolume as root. Then using EFI variables the new bootloader entry is configured as default.