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?

  • Pumpkin Escobar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    11 hours ago
    • 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
    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      2·
      7 hours ago

      archinstall is still unstable as hell. I find that my best bet is to:

      1. Configure everything exactly like I want through the dialog
      2. Save the user and system preferences to their respective JSONs
      3. Mount a USB stick and copy the JSONs there
      4. Restart the archinstall process by loading from the JSONs, then hit commit
      5. When the above fails, restart the whole machine and jump to step 4, where it magically works
      • Pumpkin Escobar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        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.