Install Arkyn OS

Caution

Installing erases the whole target disk. Back up anything you need first.

Boot the stick

1. Plug the stick into the target PC and power on.
2. Open the boot menu — F12 on ThinkPads (F11, F12 or Esc on most PCs) — and pick the UEFI entry for the stick (for example UEFI: USB Flash Drive), not a legacy one.
3. Keep Secure Boot on. Arkyn boots through Ubuntu’s signed shim, GRUB and kernel.
4. There is no boot menu and no countdown: the Arkyn splash appears, then the live desktop, and the installer opens by itself. Hold Esc (UEFI) or Shift (BIOS) during start-up if you need the menu, for example for safe graphics.

Before installing, check in the live session that Wi-Fi, keyboard, trackpad, sound and the display work — what works live will work installed.

The installer

The installer (Calamares) walks you through:

• Welcome, Location, Keyboard — English (United Kingdom), the UK keyboard and Europe/London are preselected. Change them if you need to.
• Partitions — Erase disk, Btrfs. Encrypt system is ticked by default. Keep it and enter a strong passphrase twice. You will type it at every boot, and it cannot be recovered if lost.
• Encryption — a confirmation page. If you unticked encryption, it turns red and explains what an unencrypted laptop exposes. Go Back to turn it on again: it cannot be added later without reinstalling.
• Users — your name, login and password. The computer name defaults to arkyn — generic and non-identifying; keep it that way.
• Your setup — what Arkyn Setup will offer after the first restart.
• Summary → Install. A slideshow explains Arkyn while files are copied. Restart when asked and remove the stick.

What you get on disk

• A small EFI partition and an unencrypted /boot (Ubuntu’s signed GRUB can’t open the encrypted volume, so the kernel lives outside it).
• A LUKS2 encrypted volume holding Btrfs with @, @home, @log and @cache subvolumes, compressed with zstd. Swap uses compressed RAM (zram), not a swap partition.