Follow-up question: I'm in the US and the initial installation is taking forever. Pacman seems to be running at just 60-80 KiB/s when I normally get 5MiB/s. IS there a way to have the installer choose a local mirror before downloading all the packages?
Oh, blendOS uses cloudflaremirrors.com during installation, which points at the Arch mirror it thinks it closest to you, and installation should be quite fast in North America (the blendOS package repo's hosted in Germany, but it shouldn't be too slow and doesn't host too many packages required for installation). However, I do plan to make that configurable (as an option for users that know what they're doing, or perhaps through a CLI installer for advanced users), and might implement it in the coming few days.
Ok, thanks for the heads-up. I'm running it in a local VM and for some reason my host Arch system is significantly faster at downloading and installing packages than the blendOS guest. Not sure why, but just thought I'd mention it.
Edit: never mind, I messed up the first installation so had to do-over, and the slow download speed seems to have recovered this time.