Gentoo. Not an Arch fork, and uses OpenRC by default. I use it and love it. Portage is the best package manager out there, imo.

You can still get binaries of the really annoying things to compile, like Firefox. Otherwise, it's all source-based.

I'd advise installing it in a VM or on a spare computer first to get your hands around what it is.

In your case, you'll want to specify the following flags in you makefile:

OpenRC, -systemd

You'll add a bunch of others in there too depending on architecture and personal priorities.

Follow the handbook. https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/

There's also Calculate Linux, which is basically Gentoo with a graphical front end, but I think it's Intel only. CLI is more fun anyway.

Just use Gentoo. Do it from scratch on the command line without the GUI installer like a pro 👍

At the very least you'll learn how everything works at a deeper level.

Not sure, but you can get a very similar experience with fork as follows:

Step 1. Download and install arch.

Step 2. Go to kitchen and grab fork.

Step 3. Jab fork into you eye ball socket

It sounds like Gentoo is literally exactly what you want.

I am currently not using gentoo, and because the packages in its default repos are only updated when necessary, and the break-my-gentoo repo is more of a joke than an actual replacement for arch.

I'm sorry, but I am genuinely confused here.

Gentoo can be both stable and bleeding edge and allows you to mix and match on a per-package basis.

Does setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" globally not make things bleeding edge enough for you? Grab *-9999 packages instead.

It kindof seems like what you're looking for is Gentoo. Any reason why you're reticent to go that direction?

Whats wrong with Gentoo?

If you are looking for a distro similar to Arch where you can compile everything from source you can just use Arch. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_build_system

Disclaimer: I have never used this feature so don't know how easy it is to use, but I do use Arch which is how I know it exists. (I use Arch btw)

This is kinda the opposite of what you're asking for, but might address the reason that you're asking the question?

CachyOS is an Arch based distro, but it precompiles many arch packages (and some AUR packages) in several versions, optimised for either x86_64-v3 or x86_64-v4.

So if your goal is "optimised" rather than "compile yourself" it might be worth looking at

You could try Guix! It's ostensibly source based but you can use precompiled binaries as well (using the substitute system)

It's a source-first Functional package distro like Nix but uses Scheme to define everything from the packages to the way the init system (Shepherd) works.

It's very different from other distros but between being functional, source-first, and having shepherd, I personally love it

Most AUR packages that aren't postfixed with "-bin" are compiled on your system. Most distro packages have AUR counterparts, but they're usually git builds, so using them for every package you can will probably just break your system.

Does sound like what youre looking for is gentoo. Packages may be a little older than arch, but its a rolling release too. You get new stuff fast

I wish more distros gave instructions for actually building the entire distro from source like this.

Im a huge gentoo nerd but recently have found https://nixos.org/ to be quite satisfying as well.