Alga

Ark Linux's graphical installer and system updater. Built with Rust, GTK4, and Libadwaita.

Features

• Install Ark Linux to disk (UEFI only — systemd-boot or GRUB2)
• System update via bootc upgrade with live progress
• App self-update from the About page
• Configurable periodic update checks (app + OS) with native GNOME notifications
• BLS boot entry sync after every upgrade — always shows current + rollback deployment in boot menu
• Network connectivity check on launch

Disk Layout

The installer partitions the target disk as follows:

Partition	Size	Filesystem	Purpose
1	1024 MiB	FAT32 (EFI-SYSTEM)	EFI System Partition
2	Remaining	btrfs (root)	OS root

Btrfs Subvolumes

Subvolume	Mount Point
@	/
@var	/var
@var-log	/var/log
@var-cache	/var/cache
@var-tmp	/var/tmp
@tmp	/tmp
@snapshots	/.snapshots
@opt	/opt

All btrfs mounts use compress=zstd,noatime options. The @snapshots subvolume is compatible with Timeshift.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zamkara/alga/main/install.sh | sh

Installs alga and all required dependencies automatically. Supports Arch, Ubuntu/Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE.

Dependencies

Package	Purpose
gtk4	UI toolkit
libadwaita	GNOME UI components
polkit	Privilege escalation (pkexec)
bootc	OS install and upgrade
ostree	Deployment management
skopeo	Container image operations
btrfs-progs	Btrfs filesystem support
dosfstools	FAT/ESP formatting
efibootmgr	EFI boot entry management
util-linux	blkid, lsblk, sfdisk

Versioning

Releases use the GitHub Actions run number as version (e.g. v70). The version is baked in at build time via the ALGA_BUILD_NUMBER env var.

Build

cargo build --release

For a release build matching CI:

ALGA_BUILD_NUMBER=<run_number> cargo build --release