Getting started

Download

Download ISO

Boot it in a VM

The fastest way to try Larch right now is in a VM. Boot the ISO and you're straight into a working desktop, no rescue TTY to click through first: SDDM autologs into a larch user, niri (Wayland compositor) with noctalia as the shell, dark theme, kitty as the terminal, Firefox as the browser. Display resolution auto-detects rather than assuming real hardware, so it works the same in a VM's virtual output as on a laptop screen.

One requirement: niri needs a real GPU render node. A default VM setup (plain virtio-vga, no 3D) shows a black screen forever. See Testing in a VM for the exact libvirt/QEMU config that works.

Two things worth knowing about the live session itself, VM or real hardware:

• The larch user has no password across reboots. Run passwd first if you need SSH into it.
• The session is stateless. Nothing you change persists past a reboot, this isn't an installed system yet.

Installing Larch

Larch uses Calamares, via larch-calamares, our own fork with Larch's branding, defaults, and a few extra install steps. It opens automatically on live boot; if it gets closed, relaunch it from the install button on the noctalia bar.

The flow: welcome, language, keyboard layout, partitioning, user account, optional extras, then a summary before anything gets written to disk. See Installation guide for what each step does.

• Partitioning: erase the disk, install alongside another OS, or partition manually. /boot always gets its own unencrypted partition, separate from the root filesystem.
• Encryption: on by default, with an opt-out checkbox. LUKS encrypts root; swap is zram, not a disk partition, so there's nothing else to encrypt.
• Bootloader: GRUB, with Larch's own theme, installed automatically. No separate configuration screen.
• User account: the shell is zsh, and niri/noctalia/zsh config carries over from the live session, same setup either way.
• Packages: chezmoi, pass, and Pika Backup install automatically (see Default apps), on top of the dev/power-user tooling already in the base system (see Development tools). The extras screen adds Docker, Incus, or Chromium, none selected by default.

Calamares itself gets removed from the installed system once setup finishes, it's only needed once.