Arch Linux – Best Tips for Beginners?

[dima@feddit.uk]

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

[_____@lemm.ee]

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 undersided result is going "hmm what do these all do, why do I have 2000+ packages"

[couldbealeotard@lemmy.world]

Lol

"The best way to run arch is to have a second non-arch computer at all times"

I think that sums it up

[ikidd@lemmy.world]

It's all automated now, it's pretty hard to mess up a standard install. It's not like the good old days.

[propter_hog@hexbear.net]

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.

[onlooker@lemmy.ml]

Are you talking about archinstall or have they actually automated the default installation method?

[american_jesus@lemm.ee]

This.
"Just do a quick update" and spend 1h trying to fix some broken updates

Also look at https://archlinux.org/news/ before updating (or follow the RSS feed), some updates may need manual intervention

[jumuta@sh.itjust.works]

i thought yay told you to not run it with sudo?

[pumpkinescobar@lemmy.world]

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.

[templa@beehaw.org]

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

[corrodedcranium@leminal.space]

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.

[corrodedcranium@leminal.space]

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?

[corrodedcranium@leminal.space]

Paying close attention to news feeds is something I wish I did when I ran Manjaro.

[bonje@lemmy.world]

• 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.

[thevoidzero@lemmy.world]

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.

[drwho@beehaw.org]

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).

[ndondo@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

I've only seen this on a system I hadn't changed the wallpaper on. But agreed the stock ones suck

[templa@beehaw.org]

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

[corrodedcranium@leminal.space]

Is there a chance that Arch says that so they don't have to take on the responsibility of endorsing yay while also acknowledging its prevalence?

Like if Nintendo made a statement saying they recommend against third party mods or repairs that deal with joycon stick drift because they don't want to be held accountable or contacted about issues consumers run into a result of them.

[9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world]

They acknowledge many wrappers, not just yay. However, none are officially supported.

Arch Wiki