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?
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.
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.
don’t use archinstall if it’s the first time, the manual installation is not that hard
I learned so much from just going wiki-diving at every step of the installation and post-installation
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
Install slackware instead! But if you must, yay.
Any reason you would recommend Slackware specifically?
I’ve watched a few Youtube videos on the history of it and the advantages of it but I don’t recall much. It seemed like a lot of people who had used Slackware a long time ago simply continuing to use Slackware and people using at as a learning tool because of how user involved it is.
Would you recommend people start with Slackware itself or a Slackware-based distro?
Do yourself a favour and install it on a virtual machine first. Screwing up an install on Arch is frighteningly easy. The Arch Wiki is your friend, use it. Also, read the installation instructions before you begin the installation, not during. If this sounds like too much of a headache (understandably so), then give EndeavourOS a whirl.
It’s all automated now, it’s pretty hard to mess up a standard install. It’s not like the good old days.
funny you say that since I just did it (in virtualbox thankfully) and gave up until I heard about endavourOS a few minutes ago
You boot into your installation media and type archinstall then pick the options you want. You can do it the manual way but Arch install works great.
Alright I’ll try again and let you know, what DE do you recommend? I use cinnamon right now
The past 2 years I’ve only been using Arch with KDE plasma. It was the one that clicked with me and got me to stay using Linux. Before I ran pop! Os for a little while and didn’t really like it or gnome then I went back to windows.
That’s what I thought, but then when arch install fcks up it seems even harder to fix. I ised it because I have been getting new computers so it was easier to run run it. It messed up the SSD in a way, and trying to run it again wouldn’t work because it can’t find the SSD that it did something to. It took a while to manually fix all that.
Also idk why arch install doesn’t have easy way to partition home and root, the default suggestions’s root is too small, changing it requires manually making each partition, just take an integer(%) allocated for home and calculate from there.
Are you talking about archinstall or have they actually automated the default installation method?
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.
So many tips, let me add mine.
- btop - for monitoring and process management
- pacseek - terminal UI for installing, searching packages (uses yay)
- chaotic aur - repo for prebuilt binaries that are generally ok
When installing use the archinstall the first time, unless you really want to go into the deep end and use the normal install.
