Arya Linux is built from source code of packages, libraries and applications that is publicly available over the internet. This limits the numbers of applications that can be installed on AryaLinux, because there are still a lot of applications out there which are not open source and since AryaLinux does not have support for Wine, Windows applications are out of question. Being built from source however brings in other advantages - you get a vanilla system that has not been modified or patched by us. In case you build AryaLinux in your own system from ground up, you end up getting the most compatible Linux system because its built on your system itself compared to downloading and installing AryaLinux. There are downsides as well to being built from source. Installing large applications take time, especially if your system is not fast enough. Moreover due to the built from source nature of AryaLinux, uninstalling applications from AryaLinux is not an easy thing to do.

Arya Linux Packaging System (alps)
AryaLinux ships with the alps tool which similifies the process of building and installing applications and libraries in AryaLinux. Having been heavily inspired by LFS and BLFS, applications in AryaLinux are not installed via binary packages (except a few). That is why there is no packaging system in AryaLinux. Installing from source is a difficult thing to do especially for people with no background in software development. So we have created a tool that would make the task of downloading, building, installing and resolving dependencies for applications easy. alps provides a command line interface with basic package management options like install, upgrade etc to easy application installation and update. Learn more about alps here.

Arya Linux Build platform
AryaLinux is not just a distribution, AryaLinux also provides a build platform so that you too can build your own distribution from source. Being open source you are also free to remaster, respin AryaLinux to build your own Linux distribution. AryaLinux build scripts can be used to build any kind of distribution like GUI less applications which run on servers and distributions with custom Desktop manager build from independent desktop manager components and full blown distributions with applications and live media all with a few simple commands.