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ArchWiki: your source for Arch Linux documentation on the web. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
The worse the installer the better the documentation.
It's a joke, but perhaps there may be a core of truth in there. An underlying psychological process at play.
I've had the same Arch installation between four laptops over 12 years. Boot from a USB Linux distro and enter command line. Partition the new laptop, setup disk encryption, rsync the file system via USB external enclosure, modify the ftab, crypttab, and refind.conf, reboot. Don't have to re-install any software or re-setup and sync any accounts.
Same, but with Debian for almost 20 years. Don't remember how I did it before, but the last few migrations were just `dd if=/dev/sda.old of=/dev/sda.new` and then gparted to enlarge the root partition to fill out the new disk.
Feels a lot safer to do the system- and package installation from scratch and then rsync/dd only /home and /etc.
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Just as an example, this guide suddenly assumes that "yay" is installed. Even though AUR helpers like yay aren't officially recommended by ArchLinux and also aren't trivial to install.
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.
This 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!
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 same regardless of which wrapper you use. Might be a game-changer in X years whenever the community moves on to the next wrapper.
You have some cases where yay is being used to actually install repository packages (not AUR). Would recommend changing these from yay to pacman. Like from:
yay -S mesa mesa-demos mesa-utils vulkan-intel intel-media-driver intel-gpu-tools
pacman -S mesa mesa-demos mesa-utils vulkan-intel intel-media-driver intel-gpu-tools
Could consider instead an approach like "There's this thing called AUR ([Link]). [Brief explainer]. Some people use a helper like yay([current link]) aurutils or aurch. [Proceed to show manual build-and-installation via git-clone and makepkg, as well as how to rebuild/update later]"
I know SteamOS uses an immutable file system over a custom Arch install. Have any people here tried this kind of thing with immutable file systems on Arch and is there a realistic benefit?
Arch is pretty much the opposite of immutable. An immutable filesystem sort of implies a specific collection of packages chosen by someone else and combined in a monolithic release. Everyone gets the same OS, and overlays their data on top of it. Arch contains the specific packages you have chosen, and they are all updated asynchronously using a rolling release system. Not that you couldn't have a read-only os partit…
Again, very much out of my depth here so sorry if i'm misusing terms etc.
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Arch is pretty much the opposite of immutable. An immutable filesystem sort of implies a specific collection of packages chosen by someone else and combined in a monolithic release. Everyone gets the same OS, and overlays their data on top of it. Arch contains the specific packages you have chosen, and they are all updated asynchronously using a rolling release system. Not that you couldn't have a read-only os partit…
Have you used SteamOS? I don't know the particulars but I'm pretty sure they do indeed make all the important bits read-only. You can temporarily use pacman as root, but it isn't supported so any changes made are overwritten when an upgrade happens or a system crash causes a the partition to be verified. Again, very much out of my depth here so sorry if i'm misusing terms etc.
From what I can tell, it seems that 3.x os updates are distributed as an entire os image?
It is based on arch, but you don't update individual packages with pacman.
Basically everyone gets the same unchanging os, with individual games and data separately.
If people want Arch with a GUI installer I would recommend EndeavourOS instead of Manjaro. EOS offers a much more native/close-to-Arch experience while Manjaro has many more of its own repos/packages/OS modifications (and issues) and is more of a Linux Mint to Ubuntu situation.
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> How is Wayland support these days? I love i3 but I know Sway promises to be close enough. I think it depends on what you mean by “Wayland”, but I’m an Arch/Sway user with AMD hardware on my desktop and Apple silicon on my laptop, and Sway performance/stability is great on both, with the caveat that my laptop is now running the Asahi Fedora remix instead of Arch, since the Asahi team killed the Arch port off a while…
How's Asahi these days? Stable enough to run as a daily?
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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.
I think it's great. You clone a git repository which is amazing since you can just pull in new commits to get updates. Then you read and understand the PKGBUILD. When you are satisfied that it's not malware, you basically just run makepkg and it does everything . Then you vote on the package so that it's more likely to be included in the official repositories in the future.
Out of curiosity, do you count community as official?