“Modern” is an utterly meaningless word and this blog uses it a lot.
Modern means "better designed with the current software usage environment in mind".
It definitely doesn’t mean that.
Installing Arch Linux on a Laptop
131–139 of 139 posts
Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Laptop
#132> In our case, LVM makes it easy to allocate virtual partitions inside an encrypted SSD partition.
Is it really, though?
The author is using LVM to manage "virtual partitions", but then it's using 100%FREE for the larger partition, and using ext4 for all partitions.
In my experience this setup makes it actually harder to manage partition sizes, as before shrinking a partition a resize of the underlying ext4 partition would be necessary.
Nowadays it would have been better to use one of the modern volume-managing filesystems.
AFAIK the option available out-of-the-box in Arch Linux would be btrfs, but ZFS is another excellent (better, in my opinion) option.
Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Laptop
#133These types of posts are often more harfmul than helpful. ArchLinux already has proper installation instructions and those who cannot follow them aren't recommend to run it. The main installation issues the ArchLinux forum sees is from people following outdated third party installation guides.
Isn't there a GUI installer for Arch. I am sure I am capable of installing it but I don't feel the need to get that involved.
There is an official install script now
Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Laptop
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The design decisions around AUR befuddle me to this day. It's utterly arcane in how to use it. Or rather it feels like it wasn't designed at all and simply evolved. I highly recommend people to use "yay" and similar helpers that make a lot of the problems simply go away.
The AUR makes either perfect sense or no sense depending on what you think it is. If you think it's an extra repo with more software, then it's a bit odd: Why no binaries? Why the antagonistic view of AUR helpers? Heck, why doesn't pacman just have an option to automatically use the AUR? Just add it as another repo next to extra. On the other hand, there's another viewpoint, where the AUR is what happens if you provi…
> I think the AUR certainly started as the second thing, but it's often viewed as the first, and maybe it even should be the first thing. But if you assume it came from the second option then all its design choices make sense.
People who cite the AUR as a major reason to use or prefer Arch (which seems to be a lot) definitely see it and use it as the former. If it's not that, pretty much all of the package availability arguments in favor of Arch disappear.
(Which is fine— I don't think package availability arguments are very good when it comes to distro selection in general, except for non-technical people and absolute noobs.)
Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Laptop
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
The design decisions around AUR befuddle me to this day. It's utterly arcane in how to use it. Or rather it feels like it wasn't designed at all and simply evolved. I highly recommend people to use "yay" and similar helpers that make a lot of the problems simply go away.
The AUR makes either perfect sense or no sense depending on what you think it is. If you think it's an extra repo with more software, then it's a bit odd: Why no binaries? Why the antagonistic view of AUR helpers? Heck, why doesn't pacman just have an option to automatically use the AUR? Just add it as another repo next to extra. On the other hand, there's another viewpoint, where the AUR is what happens if you provi…
It's really only meaningfully used as the first thing by virtually anyone.
Arch's whole identity as a distro is that of a coworker who is capable and competent at all the most useful aspects of his job whilst being completely useless at things which ultimately don't matter so you ignore his body odor, taste in music, and mismatched socks.
Nobody obtains security by watching the package script flash through their terminal just like nobody gains anything useful by doing a manual install at the terminal. These don't matter because you can use a script to install arch and use a helper script the same way you use apt.
Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Laptop
#136This is the step-by-step process I followed to install Arch Linux on my laptop with the following features: - Wayland - Plasma 6 - Plymouth - PipeWire - LVM on LUKS - Unified Kernel Image - TPM PIN unlock - Secure Boot Let me know what you think!
Thanks for sharing! Leaning on and only waving to yay might do the reader a disservice and cause more confusion by making the context very easy to skip over, and without that it will probably just be frustrating to keep using Arch and keep treating yay like a traditional pacman-style package manager... Doing it via makepkg first gets you some understanding of "what's going on under the hood" and what's basically the…
Thank you for the feedback! As you and other have suggested, I removed the "yay" requirement and added a brief explanation that its install instruction can be found in the other guide
Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Laptop
#137This is the step-by-step process I followed to install Arch Linux on my laptop with the following features: - Wayland - Plasma 6 - Plymouth - PipeWire - LVM on LUKS - Unified Kernel Image - TPM PIN unlock - Secure Boot Let me know what you think!
Nice write-up! My install process is slightly different (I suspect everyone who uses Arch ends up having their own little procedure built up over the years that varies slightly, since the flexibility is part of the appeal), so I'll try to focus on substantive feedback rather than feedback on hyper-specific choices that don't matter: * For something as nebulous as specific cryptographic settings, I think it's worth el…
Thank you for the valuable feedback! I applied your suggestions, in particular sticking with pacman and explaning my encryption and PCRs values.
Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Laptop
#138This is the step-by-step process I followed to install Arch Linux on my laptop with the following features: - Wayland - Plasma 6 - Plymouth - PipeWire - LVM on LUKS - Unified Kernel Image - TPM PIN unlock - Secure Boot Let me know what you think!
Great attention to security -- but what is your strategy for backup, as preparation for recovery from loss of the hardware?
I wrote my own python wrapper around Rustic and RClone to achieve 3-2-1 file-level backups: https://github.com/AlphaJack/rusticlone/.
I first tried Rustic's native RClone support, but performance were awful. Backups are automated and run on a daily basis. To restore all my repo (or just one) I run a single command, if I have the repo configs in place.
To backup the repo configs I manually make a second backup by putting them, among all other configurations for my devices, in an encrypted .7z archive, which I upload in a remote cloud storage.
To reinstall Arch, I turned my notes into an automated script that does that in few minutes. The guide in the post derives from it, so it's quite up-to-date.
Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Laptop
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just a normal arch install, no hard mode about it.
Launch the guided archinstall is the comfortable mode, 2/3 of the article are done automatically through option selects at the beginning, and one installs Arch within two minutes. A configuration file can be saved also. The archinstall command/script doesn't (yet?) implement disk sector-size selection and some of the other relevant details of the article, but the introduction of this installation mode within Arch mak…
> disk sector-size
At least in the case of NVMe disks, changing the LBA format does not seem to increase performance, and more importantly, in some cases could degrade the random read-write speed for just increasing sequential a little (bad thing, random read-write it is more important that sequential for a SO).
In theory the mainboard will select the appropriate format for the NVMe disk.
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/setting-4k-sector...