That's because they're measuring the tarball, which is a worthless metric anyway (for example, we just switched to supporting .tar.xz, which reduced the size of

That's because they're measuring the tarball, which is a worthless metric anyway (for example, we just switched to supporting .tar.xz, which reduced the size of Linux binary distributions close to 50% for a ~65MB total. But that doesn't tell you anything about what's inside.) The unpacked binary distribution is closer to 1GB, which sounds about right. I speculate Arch Linux is doing a regular build with nothing special. If 1GB is undoable for your laptop (which I find odd, as someone even on a 100GB device), then that's unfortunate. You're best to wait for some other build with things removed or to just build it yourself (for example, no dynamic linking).