Arch Linux – Best Tips for Beginners?
Arch Linux – Best Tips for Beginners?
I’m planning to install Arch Linux for the first time. Any recommendations on setup, must-have applications, or best practices? Also, what’s something you wish you knew before switching to Arch?
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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
archinstall is still unstable as hell. I find that my best bet is to:
- Configure everything exactly like I want through the dialog
- Save the user and system preferences to their respective JSONs
- Mount a USB stick and copy the JSONs there
- Restart the archinstall process by loading from the JSONs, then hit commit
- When the above fails, restart the whole machine and jump to step 4, where it magically works
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.
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