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?
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.
Stick to the many guides available and you will be fine. One thing which I either missed or was glossed over in most guides is to install the Linux-firmware package. It is considered an “optional” package, but on all the machines I have ever used I have run into issues without it.
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.
Note: experience may vary by compositor (xorg/wayland), desktop environment, drivers, system hardware, and your willingness to dive into details.
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
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 😆)
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.
Seems to be program by program. Usually an issue with plasma or wayland or drivers.
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The ArchWiki is amazing, probably don’t start by installing nothing but a window manager and adding things you need as you go
Probably don’t start by installing nothing but a window manager
Oops. I ran into a lot of problems by doing this, but boy did I run into a lot of tools too
I have learned so much but everything is so disfunctional because “I’ll get to it later” means never
Don’t?
EndeavorOS if you want to have an easy time. Also be comfortable reading documentation.
Why EndeavorOS over
arch-install?Mostly BC its low effort. The most intimidating thing about arch for me was the troubleshooting when things go wrong. I’m cool with that in general operation but not during the installation process. Endeavor makes it painless while still being a minimalistic install
What issues were you having with arch-install that you had to troubleshoot?
Manually resizing/replacing the efi partitions for Windows dual boot was where I decided to stop and switch to a graphical installer.
Partitioning is something I don’t mess with on the terminal. Last time I set up a new drive I used SystemRescueCD first just to use gParted before installing arch (manually)
If you don’t mind AI slop wallpapers every time you upgrade your system. I can’t wait to get rid of eOS on my desktop and just use regular Arch
I’ve only seen this on a system I hadn’t changed the wallpaper on. But agreed the stock ones suck
I don’t know why but even if I am setting my own wallpapers I still get to see the stock ones (when booting, etc), it pisses me off because it is clearly AI made and it seems the community around eOS likes them and even make worst ones on their forum
Install it in a VM. Create snapshots. When you fuck it up then revert the snapshot.
Once you’re decent at figuring out what to and not to do then try to get proficient at file system snapshots so you can do the same thing more or less on bare metal.
This, and take physical notes, or at least make notes in something you can refer to on a screen that is not your phone, ideally another desktop or a laptop computer with internet access in case something unexpected comes up during the physical install and you need to search the archwiki or the wider internet.
Lol
“The best way to run arch is to have a second non-arch computer at all times”
I think that sums it up
I mean, its useful regardless of the OS. When my Windows install broke and a system image restore got botched it was useful having a laptop.
- archinstall is one of the better/best distro installs around - it just does what it says it will and is pretty intuitive
- LUKS encryption is easy to set up in archinstall - strongly recommend encrypting your root partition if you have anything remotely sensitive on your system
- If you do use encryption but don’t like typing the unlock password every reboot, you can use tpm to unlock - yes, this is less secure than requiring the unlock password every time you reboot, but LUKS + TPM unlock is still MUCH better than an unencrypted drive just sitting there
- sbctl is a good tool for secure boot - If you want to get more secure, locking down bios with an admin password, turning on secure boot, sbctl works really well and is pretty easy to use. I would suggest reading up to understand what it’s doing before just installing/configuring/using it
- yay is a solid AUR helper / pacman wrapper
archinstall is still unstable as hell. I find that my best bet is to:
- Configure everything exactly like I want through the dialog
- Save the user and system preferences to their respective JSONs
- Mount a USB stick and copy the JSONs there
- Restart the archinstall process by loading from the JSONs, then hit commit
- When the above fails, restart the whole machine and jump to step 4, where it magically works
Ah, good to know. I haven’t really used that save configuration and reuse process, I just do the install directly at the end of configuring everything. But I can see the draw for using that, a shame it doesn’t seem to work that well.
I’ve been using Arch off and on for a long time, since it was horrible to install and updates did often break stuff. This is not the case now 🖖, and the Arch wiki is your friend.
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Consider using btrfs with automated snapshots using yabsnap. It includes a configurable pacman hook in case something goes awry. Also just nice to have snapshots in case you accidentally delete a file or something.
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Use paru, an AUR helper. Good for random things which may not be officially packaged. Expect to run into failures, and learn to diagnose them. Sometimes it’s just a new dependency the packager missed. For both paru and pacman, clean the cache once in a while or automatically, or things will get out of hand.
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Do the “manual” setup, at least the first time, so you have an idea what’s going on. Don’t forget to install essential stuff like iwd (if needed) when you do pacstrap, or else you might have to boot from live again to fix it. Once you’re done, take care to follow the important post install steps, like setting up a user with sudo, a firewall, sshd, etc.
As for general setup, I’ve recently embraced systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved. Might be worth giving it a shot, since there is no default network manager like application. You can even convert all your wireguard client configs into networkd interfaces.
Best practice: Keep a personal log of various tweaks and things you’ve configured, and set up automated backups (more of general guidance).
Have fun!
Paru is a yay alternative. You can use either one. Just pointing this out since yay is mentioned in a lot of the other comments. I am not saying not to use paru. I am just pointing out that it is not something different. You can use paru instead of hay in any of the other comments in this thread. Or use yay instead of paru in this one.
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- 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.
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.
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.
Use EndeavousOS instead because the initial install process is simpler.
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”
Only update your system if you have some time on your hands afterwards, in case something breaks. Happened to me a few times before.
This.
“Just do a quick update” and spend 1h trying to fix some broken updatesAlso look at https://archlinux.org/news/ before updating (or follow the RSS feed), some updates may need manual intervention
Paying close attention to news feeds is something I wish I did when I ran Manjaro.
Use btrfs with snapshots. Verify you know how to boot into snapshot after a failed update and repair the system. This is the most important thing and lets you experiment much more freely.
I didn’t read the documentation so I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to use sudo with yay.
-Ss can be added to pacman to search for packages. Pretty useful if you don’t want to DuckDuckGo them every time.
As for applications one neat one I don’t see recommended very often is xkill. You can use it to kill applications kind of like you would with the task manager in Windows. htop is probably a closer comparison to the task manager in general though.
There are a lot of Arch-based distros that are incredibly easy to install if you want a very easy setup process that doesn’t involve a lot of terminal work.
i thought yay told you to not run it with sudo?
It does. It gives you this message
-> Avoid running yay as root/sudo.
I only ran Debian and Ubuntu based distros up until that point so I thought you always needed to install packages using sudo.
I am pretty sure I ignored the warning initially because the first couple packages I tried to install with sudo and yay worked.
This was a while ago.
You are better off using -Ss with yay than pacman. If you use pacman, it only searches the Arch repos. If you use yay, it also searches the AUR.
Make sure you put “by the way I use arch” at the end of all your posts
And the neofetch print out
