Archlinux

Archlinux is a rolling release linux distribution that is constantly updating and is often considered bleeding edge. It has a tendency to break, often, with updates but it generally impacts low level applications and custom things that rely on super-selective (outdated) versions of other software.

Installing Arch Linux

Packages of Interest

Most of this has moved to Arch Packages

Graphical Interface

To get setup in a GUI, your basic steps are:

Drivers
- Like NVIDIA or AMD or Vulkan
Xorg
- pacman -S xorg xorg-xinit xorg-server xorg-server-utils xterm
Desktop Environment
- Like XFCE or KDE
- Make sure to get a display manager as well like SDDM
Audio
- Pulseaudio / ALSA

Gaming

Dependencies

Wine
Proton
Vulkan
Lib32

Launchers

Steam
Lutris
Legendary (Epic Games Store)

Hardware Performance and Monitoring

Glances
- Hardware monitoring and process viewer
- Typically just execute the following or add it to your autostart and goto http://localhost:61208/

   glances -w &

Steamtinkerlaunch
- To launch things like Gamemode and MangoHUD
- Tweak launch settings of a ton of things prior to launching a game

   gamemoderun %command%
   mangohud %command%

- Modify steam launch options or run a game in place of command with

   stl %command%

Gamemode
- Modifies performance profiles (like CPU/GPU powersave/performance) and other tweaks for games
MangoHUD
- Overlay for performance monitoring

Custom Kernels

See Kernels for more info

Maintenance

ArchWiki

Cleaning up after Pacman and systemd

Sometimes pacman and systemd will get really bloated after a while and you'll notice /var/ getting a little heavy on disk side. If you're not doing log rotation you'll likely encounter more issues in /var/log, but we'll get to that.

journalctl --vacuum-time=2weeks
pacman -Sc

That'll clear up some disk space for ya.

Goals

Backups

Sometimes you gotta nuke it from orbit, here's how to prepare for rebuilding:

Configs

See what's changed since you installed the system (run as root):

   pacman -Qii | awk '/^MODIFIED/ {print $2}'

User configs are typically in the /home/ folder or ~/.config