SparkyOS: Lightweight general-purpose Arch, on a pendrive

SparkyOS is a novel distro from the folks behind SparkyLinux: it's a version of Arch that can you can use without installing it at all. SparkyOS is a new distro from the team behind the Debian-based SparkyLinux, but it's quite different. SparkyOS is based on Arch, and it runs entirely from USB. It's not a conventional live medium – this is a full local install, but shipped as an image of a USB key that you can boot and run. It comes with the Xfce desktop and an array of apps. The idea is that you can boot and run it on any x86-64 UEFI computer, entirely from a USB key, without touching the hard disk at all. This is quite different from its forerunner, which is a relatively conventional Debian-based distro, one which The Register has mentioned a few times over the years: first back in 2015 in a lightweight distro roundup , and more recently in 2024 when we praised its array of desktop environments . Earlier this year, we noted that the latest SparkyLinux featured a complete 32-bit edition , even though its parent distro has dropped its 32-bit x86 kernel . This is also not your typical live distro. Unless you're running on some Arm computer with nonstandard firmware, most Linux distros install from an image written to a USB pendrive, the same way that they did decades ago: in the noughties when they installed from a DVD, and back in the 20th century, when it was a CD instead. Most optical media use some form of the ISO standard 9660 filesystem , which is quite limited – despite multiple extensions, the core is a basic structure comparable to the ancient MS-DOS FAT. That's not much use for Linux, which needs long filenames, permissions, and metadata, plus things like symbolic links. So, to this day, most live Linux media have a few boot files and the OS itself is kept inside a big compressed file called a SquashFS , inside which is a real Linux filesystem. However, because it's inside something akin to a Zip file, it's read-only. You can't update the OS or add new software. Some live media optionally offer persistence , which stores changes in another separate file. That works, but if you update the OS, all the original pre-update files remain untouched, and new ones are stored in the persistence structure in addition to the space still consumed by the originals. So, it's slow, and it's very inefficient; it takes substantially more space than a conventional disk install. So, although there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of live Linux media images out there, …