Arch Linux Install Guide

If you're just here for an install guide, hop down to the numbered list. If you're interested in learning why you should install Linux, read on!

Linux has a (well deserved) reputation for being intimidating for newcomers, and I don't think that's a problem that needs to or even can be solved. The basic model for selling operating systems isn't exchanging money for functionality, it's exchanging money for convenience. Nobody buys Taco Bell because it's better than what they can throw together at home, they buy it because they can get food without the time and effort involved in making it themselves. In that process they also defer the expertise involved in making a taco to an employee. I know that's a weird example, but you understand what I'm getting at, right?

For the longest time, I've deferred the technical expertise involved in running a Turing machine to Microsoft, Dell, and other tech companies in exchange for money. However, late-stage capitalism has turned industry-leading products into spyware and e-waste, so if you actually want a functional machine, you can't just pay for one. You gotta make it yourself.

My distro (Linux distribution) history went like this:

• Raspberry Pi (for a school science project, not personal use)
• Ubuntu, just for fun and to see if I could
• Mint, a friend recommended it for newbies
• Kubuntu, after the Steam Deck sold me on Plasma
• EndeavorOS, after trying (and failing) to install Arch proper
• Arch, after finding out about arch-install
• NixOS, after learning about the Nix package manager's ability to distro-hop
• And back to Arch, after getting frustrated with Nix

The official Arch install guide is very much aimed at people who already know what they're doing, so I thought I'd make an install guide that makes sense to me and hopefully some of you. With me so far? Great, then let's go!

1. PREPARE INSTALLATION MEDIUM

   1. It's a lot less scary than it sounds, you just need a USB flash drive with >4GB of storage.
   2. Download the Arch ISO file from whatever mirror you want
      1. Mirrors can be really overwhelming, but they're all the same, the only difference is download speed
      2. If there's a big university near you, chances are they have a mirror you can download from (I got my ISO from MIT)
      3. Don't worry about checksum signature verification, that's above our pay-grade for now
   3. Download Balena Etcher and flash the ISO to your USB drive
      1. This will take a few minutes, so now's the time to grab a drink

2. BOOT YOUR PC INTO BIOS

   1. This step is going to be different depending on what PC you have. Generally speaking, hold down either F2 or Delete when your computer shows the manufacturer logo
   2. Navigate to a "Boot" tab and change the priority boot option from Windows Boot Manager to the flash drive you just put Linux on.
   3. Save your changes and reboot.

3. INSTALLING LINUX

   1. Finally! You're gonna see some command line gibberish pop up, but don't touch anything until you get to the full "Welcome to Arch Linux!" screen.
   2. We need to do 2 more things before starting the installation proper: connect to the internet and rank mirrors.
      1. If you're using an ethernet cable, you should be connected right away. If you're using WiFi, you're going to have to type iwctl to configure your connection. Once your command prompt shows [iwd] at the start, type in device list. This will show the WiFi devices present on your system. Most people will just have one called wlan0, so that's what I'll be using for examples. If you don't know which networks are available or you just want to check, you can type station wlan0 scan and then station wlan0 get-networks to list the networks you can connect to. To actually connect, type station wlan0 connect (insert network name here). It will prompt you for a password afterward, but after that, you should be connected. An easy way to check is to exit out of the iwctl utility by pressing "Ctl + C" and run the command ping archlinux.org. If everything works, you should now see your latency being printed every second or so. To stop pinging, just press "Ctl + C" again. This is a universal command to cancel an ongoing process, so remember it.
      2. That was a lot, so take a breather. Secondly, you're going to want to rank your mirrors. The software you'll be installing is hosted on a bunch of servers around the world, some of which are closer to you, and are subsequently much faster. You'll want to tell your system which ones to download from. This is done by downloading small amounts of junk data from each and seeing how fast it goes. Thankfully, there's a script to automate this process. I recommend "reflector", but there are others if you want to experiment. The following command will work for the majority of users, but I'll cover how to customize it in a moment: reflector --latest 5 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist. All this does is tell the system to test downloads from the 5 most up-to-date mirrors it can find, and save them sorted by speed in a text file at the specified location. If you want to test more mirrors, you can, but 5 is usually enough to find the best one for you.
      3. One last optional step before we start the guided installer: enabling parallel downloads. Type into the terminal sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf. This will bring up the GNU nano text editor, which you can use to edit text files from terminal. Scroll down to the section marked "Misc options" and remove the # at the start of the line that says "ParallelDownloads". This will un-comment the line and make it so that you can download as many packages as specified at once. The default value of 5 works well for most users, but consider upping it if you have a wired connection. Also, this is just for fun, but if you want your progress bar to look like Pac-Man, add a new line at the end that says ILoveCandy. Hit Ctrl+O to save and Ctrl+X to exit.

4. ARCHINSTALL

   1. Alright, the hard part's out of the way, this is your victory lap. Once you've connected to the internet and ranked your mirrors, type archinstall and hit enter. You'll be taken to a TUI (text user interface) showing options for installing Arch Linux. Most of these options will be fine on their default settings, but I recommend turning "separate partition for /home" off. This creates separate partitions for system files and user files, but this isn't necessary for most users.
   2. Be sure to add a user and write down the password somewhere. Most of you probably didn't need that reminder, but past me sure did.
   3. Desktop Environment is the most important and open-ended option. You'll want to select the "Desktop" category, the others are for more specialized use cases. After that, you'll see a long list of options for desktop environments. I recommend taking a minute to look up all of them and pick whichever one you vibe with. If you need help narrowing it down, the most popular ones are KDE, GNOME, and XFCE.
   4. One last thing! Under "additional repositories", check the one labeled "multilib". A ton of software packages live here, I don't know why it's not on by default.
   5. Congrats! You're done! Just hit "install" and wait for archinstall to download the desktop environment you picked. This should take around 15 minutes on a good connection, so get comfy. After that, you can say no to the post-install chroot configuration, that's also above our pay grade. Just reboot and you should be able to log in with the account you specified earlier.

5. POST-INSTALL

   1. If you're ready to dive into settings and configure your new system, this is where you get off, but if not, there's a few post-install things I would recommend you do.
   2. LINITE is an install script generator that works with a bunch of Linux distros, including Arch! Just hit Arch Linux at the top, check all the software you want, copy the command at the bottom, and paste into your terminal with Ctrl+Shift+V. An example command would look something like this:

      sudo pacman -Sy vim firefox make cmake git krita gimp inkscape blender libreoffice vlc audacity thunderbird steam wine zsh
      

   3. You can make installing packages from AUR (Arch User Repository) a lot easier by installing yay (Yet Another Yogurt wrapper). First up, make sure you have the packages base-devel and git by executing sudo pacman -S base-devel git Then, clone the git repo for yay and switch to it with git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git and cd yay After that, you can build yay from source code with the command makepkg -si To check if it installed correctly, simply type yay. If it recognizes the command, you're good.
   4. Yay is a powerful CLI (Command Line Interface), but a GUI (Graphical User Interface) is a lot easier to use for most users. For this I recommend Octopi, which you can install with the command yay -S octopi This will take a while to build, but once it's done, you can browse packages from a list, and even sort them by criteria like votes and last updated.

That was a lot, huh? Hopefully now you see why Microsoft has such a stranglehold on the desktop OS market. Turns out, computers are complicated! And Microsoft has a lot of very smart people working to make sure you don't have to understand computers in order to use one. Thankfully, with each passing year Linux gets easier to install, so here's hoping the future of the personal computer platform will be free as in freedom.