Pre-installed Arch Linux on every tier, with pacman, the AUR and a Nordic mirrorlist ready on first boot. Rebuilt every 14 days so a fresh deploy is never more than two weeks from a current -Syu. Stock kernel, no NordBastion patches.
Pre-installed Arch images on every tier — base, minimal, Wayland-headless and Docker — rebuilt every 14 days.
Pacman, AUR, stock upstream kernel — no NordBastion patches, no LTS lock-in, no opinionated re-packaging.
Pinned to one of four Nordic constitutional jurisdictions — Sweden, Finland, Norway or Iceland — paid in Bitcoin or Monero.
No stable freeze, no two-year LTS lag, no backports archaeology. When upstream Linux ships 6.11 you get 6.11 within days, not eighteen months later as a Debian-backports compile. For workloads that depend on a recent feature — io_uring, eBPF tracepoints, a new netfilter target — Arch is the shortest distance to upstream.
Arch ships nothing you did not ask for. The base group is a couple of hundred packages, all explicit; there is no "recommended" tier silently pulling in a desktop stack on a server. You compose the system you actually want with pacman, and the resulting image is auditable — every binary on disk traces back to a package you installed.
The Arch User Repository is the long tail — niche command-line tools, vendor packages, beta runtimes that no other distribution has yet picked up. PKGBUILDs are short shell scripts you can read before running; on a single-operator VPS where you already audit everything, AUR is closer to "read this five-line build recipe" than to a black-box vendor binary.
| Image | Slug | उपयोग मामला |
|---|---|---|
| Arch base (rolling) | arch-base |
The reference image — a current pacman -Syu of the official archlinux base group with openssh enabled. The default pick for a new Arch server. |
| Arch minimal-base | arch-min |
Stripped further than base — no man-pages, no docs, no recommended utilities. ~330 MB for the operator who reaches for pacman themselves on first boot. |
| Arch + Wayland (headless) | arch-wayland |
Wayland + wlroots + Sway pre-installed, optimised for headless graphics testing, browser automation under wayvnc, or remote dev workstations. |
| Arch + Docker | arch-docker |
docker, docker-compose and the iptables-nft glue pre-configured — pacman keeps the engine on the upstream cadence, no separate vendor repo to wire. |
Custom ISO mount available for archlinux-bootstrap or any derivative (Artix, EndeavourOS, CachyOS) on request — ticket-free via the panel.
Rolling release, no LTS, no backports archaeology, AUR for the long tail. The cost is the rolling discipline — pacman -Syu is a deliberate weekly habit, not an unattended cron job.
Debian-family apt tooling with the PPAs and vendor docs that target Ubuntu LTS. The easy middle between Arch's upstream-edge and Debian's conservatism. See /ubuntu-vps/.
Five-year support window, conservative package set, no surprises. The boring-correct default for production and sidecars. See /debian-vps/.
2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 120 GB NVMe. Arch minimal here runs a single-purpose service — a Caddy reverse proxy, a Tailscale relay, a yt-dlp worker — close to upstream without bloat.
4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 240 GB NVMe. The sweet spot for an Arch + Docker host running a self-built container stack, or a build-server using the AUR to compile a custom runtime.
8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 480 GB NVMe. Comfortable for a Wayland-headless image driving browser automation, an Arch + KVM nested lab, or a personal dev workstation in the cloud.
Full tier line — Sentinel · Garrison · Ravelin · Bulwark · Citadel — on /vps/.
For an operator who treats their server like a workshop — a build host, a relay node, a Wayland-headless lab, a personal cloud workstation — Arch on NordBastion gives you today's kernel, today's userland and an empty system to compose on. The pairing with a KYC-free Nordic host is consistent: two systems that refuse to make implicit choices for you and expect you to make them explicit yourself.
Pick Debian if you want to forget the server. Pick Ubuntu if your runbook already assumes apt + PPAs. Pick Arch when you actually want to live close to upstream and accept the cost.
The questions operators actually ask before running a rolling-release distribution on a privacy-first host.
Arch is a desktop distribution in the sense that most of its visible community runs it on workstations, but the underlying system — pacman, systemd, a minimal base, no opinionated init choices — is in fact extremely well suited to a single-operator VPS where you want a recent kernel, a recent userland and no LTS freeze sitting between you and upstream. The reason it is less common on servers is the rolling discipline it demands, not a technical limitation.
Every 14 days, in line with the official monthly archlinux-bootstrap cadence plus a mid-cycle refresh. A freshly-deployed Arch VPS will already be within two weeks of a current pacman -Syu — so first-boot updates are minutes, not hours, and you almost never hit a stale-keyring problem on day one.
Yes. yay and paru are not pre-installed (the Arch convention is that you choose your own helper), but the AUR is fully reachable, makepkg works against the stock /etc/makepkg.conf, and the NordBastion firewall does not block aur.archlinux.org or any Arch mirror. The official binary repos cover the bulk of server needs; AUR fills the long tail.
No, and there cannot be — Arch is explicit that partial upgrades are unsupported and the package archive does not guarantee old-version retention. The recommended workflow on NordBastion is the same as on bare metal: snapshot the VPS via the panel before pacman -Syu, run the upgrade, reboot, and roll back from the snapshot if anything in your stack does not survive. Snapshots are a single panel action; rollback is roughly 30 seconds.
linux from the core repo — the current upstream stable kernel as packaged by Arch, no NordBastion patches. linux-lts is one pacman install away if you want the long-term branch, and you can keep both installed in parallel and select between them at boot via systemd-boot. mkinitcpio is the default initramfs generator.
Honestly, not really. Arch rewards an operator who treats pacman -Syu as a deliberate weekly habit and reads /var/log/pacman.log after every transaction. If you want a server that asks for nothing for years at a time, Debian (see /debian-vps/) is the correct pairing on NordBastion — Arch is the correct pairing when you genuinely want to be close to upstream and accept the cost.
Yes. /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist is pre-generated with reflector at image build time, ranking by speed from the bastion's vantage — the top of the list is typically a Swedish or Finnish mirror (mirror.osbeck.com, mirror.f4st.host, ftp.acc.umu.se). You can re-run reflector at any time to re-rank if your workload shifts.
Yes — KVM treats your virtual disk like a real disk, and Arch's systemd-boot or grub will happily chain-load another OS installed in a second partition. The more common pattern on NordBastion, though, is to provision two separate small VPS instances for the two systems; the cost is similar to one larger dual-boot setup and the failure modes are independent.
