Pumpkin Escobar

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.

• 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’s default btrfs layout has I think 4-5 separate subvolumes (I’m not running btrfs anymore so can’t check) but at the very least I remember it has:

• /
• /var
• /home

being separate subvolumes and mountpoints, you can just use a previous snapshot from 1 without rolling back others

Related to the snapshotting stuff, timeshift-autosnap is pretty helpful, hooks into pacman and takes a snapshot before installing/updating packages.

Personally I found btrfs and the snapshots helpful when starting to use arch, but now that I know how not to blow things up, it has been stable enough for me I just felt ext4 was easier.