Jumping into Arch!

I have been using Arch for quite a while — though not the raw Arch Linux, rather its derivatives. I started my journey with Manjaro, and instantly fell in love. I loved the combination of pacman + AUR, and how easy it was to find and install packages — without the headache of .deb/.rpm, snap, flatpak, appimages, and the other formats that are there.

Initially, I loved Manjaro for how simple it was to use for a first-time Arch user. Pamac as an UI was really good, and everything just worked. But slowly, as my distro-hopping addiction kicked in, I started looking for other derivatives, and finally stumbled upon Endeavour OS — the best Arch best distro in my opinion. It was more closer to a vanilla Arch install, with some additional tools built in. I let go of pamac, and embraced the use of terminal for pacman and yay. I felt it was better than using pamac — the occasional hiccups of the latter I faced during my Manjaro days were absent while installing apps via the terminal.

Manjaro has faced quite a backlash in recent years due to their holding packages before pushing updates — which have caused problems with outdated dependencies for some people, especially when using AUR. For me personally, I did not face any problems with Manjaro when I was using it, but that was a couple of years back.

I faced a weird issue with Endeavour OS recently though, when I was reinstalling it. My distro hopping behaviour led me to Fedora 38, and I tried it for a while and liked it, but again tried to hop back into Endeavour OS — but was not able to install it. The installer refused to open in the live environment. I tried many times, with different USB sticks and redownloaded iso images, but the installer did not open. I tried several times over several days, but wasn’t able to install it again.

I have read good things about Garuda, but it is too customized to my liking. I like distros which keep their customization to a minimum — which is exactly why I liked Fedora. Therefore, after failed attempts with Endeavour OS, I though of finally trying the vanilla Arch!

I did not attempt to install Arch previously because the task seemed daunting. There are hundreds of tutorials on Youtube and even more blog posts, but I was always concerned about missing an important command, or missing an important package — and resulting in an install which did not function properly. There are some unofficial GUI installers for Arch, but I had bad experience with one of them in the past, a few have been discontinued, and some others have bad reviews — so I steered clear of them.

I finally gained the confidence of installing Arch because of the recently released official automated script called archinstall. I found it through youtube videos, and saw people praising it for how simple it makes the installation. So I downloaded the iso, booted into the bootable USB, and installed Arch!

At the very beginning, I found scratching my head as I was not able to connect to my wifi. Other distros make connecting to wifi very simple — just a simple click to select the connection and typing a password. Here, even though I was using iwctl command like how the official documentation mentioned, I wasn’t able to connect. Then I read the documentation a little more, and saw that the wifi connection might be blocked depending on hardware, and we can unblock it using rfkill. So I did, and finally got the wifi to work.

After that, it was really a piece of cake. The installation was really simple, and the installer even took care of the hybrid disk system that I have in my computer (NVMe SSD + SATA HDD) — which not all distro installers do properly or do at all. Sure, fetching all the packages from internet may take a while depending on the speed of the mirrors, but the benefit is that you get a minimal install.

The post-install customizations require a bit more time than the derivative arch-based distros — as they provide several packages out of the box. For example, I use brave browser, which is not in the official repository but in AUR. But as an AUR helper like yay was not installer, I had to install that first (There was an option of selecting additonal packages during install, but I did not mention any packages to reduce the installation duration being even longer). Pacman wasn’t also configured to show colored comands in the terminal, which I had to tweak. A few tweaking here and there aside, there was not anything else that was problematic,

Till now, I am loving the vanilla Arch install. Its simple, lightweight and very snappy. It also is very minimal, so I can choose what I want to install and did not need to remove pre-installed packages like other distros.

My recommendation for people looking to shift to Arch would be — its best to install the vanilla Arch rather than derivatives, and it has become so mucn easier and safer to install with the official install script rather than unofficial GUI installers.

Just remember to check that the wifi connection is not blocked using rfkill before connecting to wifi.