LarchIntroduction
What Larch is and where the project stands right now
Larch is built for developers and engineers who take their setup seriously. The desktop runs on niri, a keyboard-driven, scrollable-tiling window manager, the kind of setup power users reach for because it gets out of your way once it's configured. That "once it's configured" part is usually the catch: tiling window managers normally leave you writing your own keybindings, layout rules, and window behavior from scratch, often over a weekend, before any of that speed pays off.
Larch skips the weekend. niri ships with real keybindings for moving between windows and workspaces already wired in, sane layout defaults, a dark theme, nothing left for you to build before it's usable.
The project's tagline: "Arch based Linux distro for developers and engineers." The software stack isn't generic: Larch ships the tools people building and running systems reach for every day (chezmoi, pass, lazygit, htop, btop, uv, k3d, kubectl, paru), not whatever the obvious default happens to be.
Project status
Larch is being built in three stages:
- A finished live ISO. Every tool and setting the distro promises actually present, so booting it is the real experience, not a preview of one.
- An installer. Turns that live session into an installed system. Built, and real end-to-end installs have completed successfully. This is the current focus, closing remaining gaps.
- Docs kept current. Not a stage with an end date, an ongoing commitment as the first two stages change.
Where things stand today:
| Piece | Status |
|---|---|
| Live/bootable ISO | Boots, autologin into niri + noctalia. Ships real dev/power-user tooling (see Software guide), not just the desktop shell. |
| Installer | Built (Calamares-based, see Installation guide). Encryption, GRUB, and first boot all confirmed on real test installs. |
| Post-install provisioning | Built: the installed user gets the same niri/noctalia/zsh setup as the live session. There's no shell/desktop-shell choice at install time, just the one Larch ships. |
Where to go next
- New to Larch: start with Getting started.
- Want to know what software it runs: read the Software guide.
- Building Larch yourself or contributing: see Development.