Preface

I have never ever tried Arch before, and I am dying to express my journey to somebody. Turns out, people get bored incredibly quickly when I start talking about arch :)

So this might be a slightly long post, please bear with me. Hope this might in someway help someone.

Chapter 1 - First Install

From what I have heard the one and only guide for installation you need is “The Wiki”

I have read a lot of documentations, none of them as “complete” as this one. It has everything that one might ever need. It just needs to be searched thoroughly.

I installed an extremely basic installation but I got lost on what packages to install. Getting confused with what a DE is what SDDM does and so on.

I wanted to just get some sort of a setup started so I followed this

I have never worked with btrfs file system. But I thought I’ll give it a shot. The author mentions that we need to create sub volumes of @ and @ home. (Which I completely ignored because I thought it wasn’t important and went ahead with my 2 separate partitions for each)

BIG MISTAKE

Chapter 2 - Timeshift

So now I got the hang of Arch,

Installed KDE, downloaded themes mix and matched stuff

Installed a theme for my GRUB

(Also modified it using grub-customizer by removing unecessary entries and re-ordering other entries (Linux Mint & Windows). Another mistake BTW.

Setup few other packages that I require and was quite happy with my setup.

Now, I wanted to save it. The github author of the installation guide suggested timeshift worked amazing with btrfs. So I wanted to try timeshift!

Turns out, you require @ and @ home directories since that is the setup timeshift expects (for reasons unknown)

The Fix: I won’t go into too many details but basically,

Created a copy of my root partition in “@” via the btrfs snapshot feature. 1.

Created a new subvolume “@ home” and copied my home partition into it (Please note to use cp -rp . Don’t ask how I know) 1.

Generated my fstab file again (Please note to remove previous entries in the file and not just use the >> as mentioned in the wiki. Again, don’t ask.) 1.

Generate the grub.cfg file again (And as much as I liked grub-customizer earlier. I HATED it here. It does something to the files which kind of break the generation of grub.cfg, it does not go to the vanilla configuration. Please note, just manually modify the grub.cfg for your OCD instead of messing with grub-customizer IMO) 1.

Finally, system was booting and mounted correctly, I still had my complete setup. Now I just cleaned the rest of the stuff up by deleting the previous locations of the root and home directory (gparted is pretty cool too!)

Phew,

Chapter 3 - Nvidia

Now, the only problem that I was having with my setup (now that it was completely backed up), was that I could only run 60Hz on my monitor. From most inferences I see online, it seems that installing nvidia drivers seems to have resolved the problem.

Let me just begin this by saying thank god I figured out timeshift earlier. So that I can make instant undos / redos here!

Chapter 3.1 - ???

That’s a wiki reference for you all (the 3.1 get it?). Anyways so I started here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA

Now I think I’ll get some backlash for this, but to my untrained eye, this is THE most confusing of the Arch Wiki pages I have seen. (Totally didn’t start reading Arch Wiki like a week back \s)

I got to the first step and installed nvidia-open and the later steps just confused the heck out of me. From what I could understand, I had to install the package nvidia-open and somehow set modeset=1 somewhere. I tried understanding the page for half an hour when I gaveup and just rebooted my system.

To my surprise, my monitor started working at 120 Hz right away! Big win right there.

Chapter 3.2 - The reboot

I shutdown my system, came back a day later only to see that SDDM had not even loaded. (BTW another note: ctrl + alt + f3 lets you login via TTY3)

I saw the journalctl -b and saw some log saying “nvidia-gpu i2c timeout error”. Still no idea what it means.

I tried the following to fix:

upgraded all packages

Downgraded nvidia-open and nvidia-utils (Another note: You can use the downgrade package to downgrade stuff. Also note, you can specify multiple packages in a single downgrade command to simultaneously downgrade packagase that depend on each other)

Installed nvidia-exec (nvx). It did solve the problem by shutting down my nvidia gpu entirely so that the system runs on my integrated card. But that is hardly a solution (this time I couldn’t even start the screen of my monitor with the integrated gpu)

Anyway, nothing worked, until I stumbled upon this page:

https://forum.manjaro.org/t/how-to-add-nvidia-drm-modeset-1-kernel-parameter/152447

Where the user “nikgnomic” kindly “spelled out” how to set the modeset=1.

Chapter 3.3 - Sigh

I thought it worked. However, just when I was opening my laptop to write this post, it happened again. Sometimes rebooting fixes the issue, still not sure about the cause of the problem though.

Please share any things I can try here.

Conclusion

This is the BEST experience of linux I have had ever. I am not sure why. Perhaps it is because I built it myself or maybe because of how much I got to learn along the way. I had tons of fun!

I would highly recommend anyone who is somewhat familiar with Linux or has the time to learn and read to install Arch.

Look forward to being part of the Arch community!