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 …