gnome-git

GNOME built from the development branches at gitlab.gnome.org, packaged with the official Arch Linux PKGBUILDs pointed at those checkouts. Install it with pacman on any x86_64 Arch machine. Nothing is compiled on your side.

119 packages, updated 2026-09-23 13:47 UTC.

Before you start

This is unreleased GNOME. It is rebuilt whenever upstream moves, it does not get the testing Arch gives its own packages, and it can break in ways a stable desktop does not. A spare machine or a virtual machine is the sensible place for it. Uninstalling is supported and described at the end.

You need:

• Arch Linux, x86_64.
• An up-to-date system. Run sudo pacman -Syu and reboot first. These packages are linked against current Arch libraries, so on an old install pacman will either drag in half the distribution or refuse the transaction.
• Roughly 2 GB free for the packages and their dependencies.

Install

curl -fLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iritur/pkgs/arch/install-gnome-git.sh
less install-gnome-git.sh      # it edits pacman.conf and calls sudo; read it
bash install-gnome-git.sh --all

The script adds this repository to /etc/pacman.conf above [core] and [extra], so its packages win over the Arch ones, keeps a backup of the file, then syncs and installs. Without --all it only upgrades the GNOME packages you already have.

To do it by hand instead, put this above [core] in /etc/pacman.conf:

[gnome-git]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iritur/pkgs/arch/$arch

then run sudo pacman -Syu.

Getting to a desktop

sudo pacman -S --needed networkmanager
sudo systemctl enable --now NetworkManager gdm

NetworkManager is only an optional dependency of the control center, so without it the shell's network menu stays dead. Enabling gdm brings up the login screen straight away; a reboot is cleaner for the first run.

If the session fails to start, switch to a console with Ctrl+Alt+F2 and read journalctl -b -u gdm. sudo systemctl disable --now gdm returns you to a text login.

What is in here

The GNOME platform (glib, gtk4, libadwaita, gobject-introspection and the rest), the shell and session (mutter, gnome-shell, gdm, gnome-session, the settings daemon, the control center), the core applications, and the development tools including Builder. Everything else the system needs, the kernel, mesa, pipewire, systemd, comes from the official Arch repositories as ordinary dependencies.

Deliberately left out: API documentation and the help manual, the GTK and libadwaita demo programs, the vte sample terminals, and gvfs-dnssd.

Updating

sudo pacman -Syu

These packages carry a raised epoch, which is what keeps them ahead of the Arch ones. Repository order alone would not: pacman installs the highest version it can see, and a build of GNOME's main branch often sorts below the release Arch ships, because releases are tagged on the stable branch.

Going back to stock Arch

bash install-gnome-git.sh --remove
sudo pacman -Syuu

The first command unregisters the repository, the second downgrades everything to the official packages.

Things worth knowing

• Packages are unsigned. SigLevel = Optional TrustAll tells pacman to trust whatever this URL serves. The transport is HTTPS, so the trust is in the GitHub account that publishes it.
• Version numbers read 51.0.r2.geb74a99: the last tag, the number of commits since it, and the commit id. They sort above the matching Arch release.
• Just after an update here, raw.githubusercontent.com can serve a cached package database for a few minutes. If pacman reports 404s on package files, wait five minutes and run sudo pacman -Syy.

How these are built

The build tooling is at https://github.com/iritur/gnome-git. It takes the official Arch PKGBUILDs, repoints their sources at local git checkouts, derives the version from git, and builds them with makepkg into a pacman repository.