Arch Linux – Best Tips for Beginners?

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ALWAYS avoid partial upgrades, lest you end up bricking your system: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Partial_upgrades_are_unsupported
The Arch Wiki is your best friend. You can also use it offline, take a look at wikiman: https://github.com/filiparag/wikiman
It doesn't hurt to have the LTS kernel installed as a backup option (assuming you use the standard kernel as your chosen default) in case you update to a newer kernel version and a driver here or there breaks. It's happened to me on Arch a few times. One of them completely borked my internet connection, the other one would freeze any game I played via WINE/Proton because I didn't have resize BAR enabled in the BIOS. Sometimes switching to the LTS kernel can get around these temporary hiccups, at least until the maintainers fix those issues in the next kernel version.
The AUR is not vetted as much as the main package repositories, as it's mostly community-made packages. Don't install AUR packages you don't 100% trust. Always check the PKGBUILD if you're paranoid.

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Make backups of your important files, or use a separate home partition. When I used arch, more than once I had a bricked install after doing updates. The last straw for me was when after updating my network completely went out. I switched to fedora and haven't had issues for 2+ years. Also, (this goes for every distro, but more so arch than others) NEVER update if you don't have at least some time in front of you in case something happens. Arch was definitely a good learning experience and it was fun at first tweaking everything, but the drawbacks in stability got a bit old after a while. The AUR is a godsend and it's the best thing ever, you should also be using an AUR helper like Yay to make your life easier.

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Make sure you put "by the way I use arch" at the end of all your posts

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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.

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.
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.
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!

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Read https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance before you go your first pacman -Syu

And when people tell you that you shouldn't use aur helpers like yay to blindly install/upgrade aur packages, there's a reason for it. Read the PKGBUILDs.

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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

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I have learned so much but everything is so disfunctional because “I’ll get to it later” means never

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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.

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Those who are (wisely) suggesting snapshots, do you guys use a different partitions for data and OS? Because if you do revert to an older snapshot after a while, you'd loose new data, too (unless you recover it from current state)?

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I wish I knew then that debbie does the trick for me

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Also, just paru is equivalent to paru -Syu

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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.

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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.

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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's 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.

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Start from the install guide on the wiki. It'll branch out fast and just follow all the links and read. If something goes wrong, check if you missed something on the wiki. It's an amazing resource.

Also, look up your hardware on the wiki before you start.

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And the neofetch print out

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Why paru specifically?

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It doesn’t hurt to have the LTS kernel installed as a backup option (assuming you use the standard kernel as your chosen default) in case you update to a newer kernel version and a driver here or there breaks.

I had a similar issue that was resolved by swapping to the LTS kernel. Learning about using a bootable Arch USB and chrooting into your install to make repairs would be a good thing for OP to know

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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

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Great advice.

Btw you don't need -S to install a package, just

paru packagename

Works fine

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Arch Linux – Best Tips for Beginners?