This is the story of how I installed Arch Linux. This is also the story of overcoming the challenges we face and why getting into sticky situations that get you scratching your head is actually a good thing.

This post is actually based on one of my Twitter threads.

So it had been a long time since I wanted to clean up my hard drive. I had been dual-booting with Windows alongside for design work and whatnot. Then one day I accidentally wiped the windows boot file and made it inaccessible. Needless to say my partition table was pretty messed up.

Then a few days before Christmas 2019 (Ahh, good times), my desktop environment crashed. (I had been using Manjaro with Plasma for around the last 6 months) This was the best chance to clean my machine and start fresh for 2020 (Little did I know back then that 2020 would end up like this)

The boring part was copying all my files 🤦‍♂️ Spoiler alert - I found more it difficult than installing Arch. I had installed xfce as my makeshift DE for now. I once deleted the copied folder thinking it was the older one. Luckily, I checked before deleting the original one.

After copying the files, I decided to practice the installation process in a virtual machine first. I cannot mess this up right now :P So with a virtual machine set up, I set out to install Arch! The Arch Wiki is really cool if you have the patience to read it thoroughly!

After two tries, I got bare bones Arch installed! The first time it didn't install properly, second time I forgot to create the grub config and it booted into the grub command line, and the third time I finally got it. Exciting!

But I soon realised that I didn't enable dhcpcd and hence couldn't access the internet to download further packages or anything! Shucks!

I tried a fourth time and this time, got everything correct and installed Plasma as my desktop environment 😁 (No wonder the K in KDE stood for Kool!) The satisfaction when you finally reach this point is really worth the effort.

And within two days after my DE first crashed, I started the installation in my actual hard drive, wiping all data and the messy mixture of windows and linux partitions.

Its good to have a book to read while it downloads the packages as it may take time..

And finally everything was installed perfectly! All the mistake I had made upto now made me sure to check for everything and it went smooth

And this is how my drive looks now!

So why Arch? I had been using Manjaro for some time now and was really familiar with the pacman package manager. Also I wanted to take up something to challenge myself, hopefully learning something new and interesting in the process!

In that regard, this has been a true nerd-out experience for me.

Now I can proudly say 'BTW, I use Arch'