I’m planning to install Arch Linux for the first time. Any recommendations on setup, must-have applications, or best practices? Also, what’s something you wish you knew before switching to Arch?
Arch was the distro that got me to stop distro-hopping. It’s stable, it has a rolling release, and it’s mine (as in, customizable, manageable).
I guess, if there’s anything I wish I’d known off the bat is that the Arch documentation is probably the best available. So much so, a LOT of it applies to Linux in general and not strictly to Arch.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
If something breaks, READ the error messages, understand each component, and check the wiki, there’s a very high chance the troubleshooting section has the exact issue laid out.
I’m using manjaro-i3 for a pretty long time now (6-7 years) and I’m fully satisfied, I won’t change any time soon. It was not very difficult at first, even though I wasn’t a linux user when I moved to manjaro. I would just maybe move to sway instead of i3 which seems probably more modern now.
I can recommend using endeavourOS if you do not want to waste time
But if you want to learn, go for it! Make sure to have the arch wiki ready on a second device
And understand what chroot is, is very important 😆😌
Edit: Ah and don’t forget to install yet another yoghurt
If you go the EOS route, yay is already installed.
Yes, and I love it
Maybe I should have added “if going the arch route”…
ditch it and go straight to NIxOS
“Arch” for people who think Arch is too easy.
lol Arch wasn’t hard and neither was vanilla NixOS, in fact NixOS was easier
Not if you have a weird app that only installs with a self-executing tarball. But for initial setup, sure.
Be aware that some apps will install fine from the arch repo but some others will be better installed from flatpack (e.g. inkscape) or directly as an executable (e.g. Godot).
On steam you may need to specify your video card if you run an AMD card using the DRI prime command. Some games will require -vulkan to use vulkan rather than game settings.
The only thing I have ever installed using Flatpak on Arch is pgAdmin. Inkscape from the repos works fine for me.
Nice!
What exactly works better on flatpak version? Until now, for any packages that were somehow different, repo vs flatpak, were working better in repo version. (Due to container thingy, because flatpak version could bot see everything and I was zoo lazy to fix it using flatseal 😆)
Seems to be program by program. Usually an issue with plasma or wayland or drivers.
I’ve had Discord not be up to date in the AUR. Moved to flatpak and haven’t had that issue.
Huh, works well for me, ig updates come a little late sometimes but never unable to use it.
What was your experience with Inkscape and Godot? I have those both installed from repo.
I’ve never felt the need to use flatpak at all on arch.
Godot had some driver issues. Inkscape had issues with the interface fonts.
Plasma 6/wayland
don’t use archinstall if it’s the first time, the manual installation is not that hard
Yea, I would say either go for arch manually or go straight to endeavourOS
I installed Arch like that. When I had to do a new install, I forgot everything, then I used archinstall with Xfce option and it worked fine.
I learned so much from just going wiki-diving at every step of the installation and post-installation
i don’t think i went wiki diving really, i just followed what it said but it gave me a nice overview of what does what in an arch system that i could expand on later
Don’t cheap out and use the hand holding script to ez mode the install. At least not the first time. You will learn a few things along the way.
Use EndeavousOS instead because the initial install process is simpler.
Check ArchLinux.org for news before you kick off an update. It’s got an RSS feed and a mailing list if that helps.
Read the Wiki, and turn to it first for any issues you have.
This one may be a special “me” problem, but if you’re manually interacting with wpa_supplicant, stop and go read the Networking page in the Wiki again.
Learn how to use journalctl (at least superficially) before something goes wrong.
Generally you want to restart after an update to the kernel or graphics drivers or things start degrading strangely.
I’m surprised it isn’t the norm to have a hook that checks it as part of pacman updating.
From the bottom of the installation guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations
For starts, read the wiki. Specifically, read the installation guide at least twice to get a feel for how it works and what the Arch vibe is like. This is also your chance to figure out just what you want to do. Do you want to use GRUB or UEFI? Which sounds like a better fit? What filesystem? What do you want to run? mdadm or not? A little bit of planning and reading is better than reinstalling half a dozen times (ask me how I know…)
Must-have applications? Screen or tmux. SSH. Whatever shell you’re comfortable with (bash is how I roll, but you might be a fan of fish).
- EndeavourOS is arch based with less hassle. Its more than good enough for most people. don’t get trapped by minimal install bs and other non-consequential opinionative approaches to software.
- Select btrfs as your file system and use timeshift. If you fuck up or if your updates fuck something up. There are other ways of doing rollbacks and this is just what I became familiar with. I’ve used it two times in the past year, its worth it.
- Bookmark the archwiki, 99% of the time the answer to the questions of ‘how to’ and ‘can i’ are in there
- There are multiple DE’s. Pick what works best for you before you toss that bootable USB installer. You of course can switch later down the line, but experimenting now will save you config troubleshooting later, just stick to what feels/looks best. Look around on the web to see what appeals to your workflow. There are others like Cosmic and Wayland that are not included in the arch gui installer, in which case, follow the install procedures for the DE you want and remove the old ones to avoid config overlap.
- Have Fun. If you are not, do something that is.
Wayland and Cosmic are not there yet for beginners, more like beta, watch videos from Brodie Robertson, I’ll wait half year at least to try that for newbies.
I 2nd this wholeheartedly! Been using endeavourOS for years at this point! Before endeavourOS I was distro hoping the classics. I tried Ubuntu, fedora, popOS, Debian and way more throughout my time on linux. When I tried endeavour the first time I just stuck with it. It just worked, the updates are seamless and I just like get along with it.
Print out the install guide on paper and have it with you while you go. If you fuck up networking, you’ll have the directions there to get it back.
The whole arch advantage (imo) is that you have a full understanding of what’s in your machine and how it works.
As a beginner you won’t understand and that’s okay, but you should try different things (or don’t and just focus on what works for you) as long as the end result is you doing: pacman -Qe and going “hmm that makes sense”, and imo the undesired result is going “hmm what do these all do, why do I have 2000+ packages”
Arch is good for tinkering with to make it your own, but can sometimes require tinkering to do things other distros can do straight away, e.g. adding udev rules to use certain devices or setting up zeroconf to be able to discover printers on the network automatically
If you want to be able to roll back changes easily you could set up your root and home partitions as btrfs subvolumes and use snapper to take snapshots, which can be combined with pacman hooks to automatically take snapshots when updating/installing software and can even be set up to allow booting into the snapshots which could be useful if you break your system
