Disclaimer: This guide is not intended to be a replacement for the excellent arch wiki. You should definitely read the wiki's install guide first. This guide aims to be a streamlined set of install steps for a simple installation. Further, you should be suspicious of any guide published on the internet that isnt the official wiki as they can rapidly be outdated in a rolling release like arch. This guide was last updated 4/17/2021.

Second, install guides that have preset disks ala /dev/sdX you have to mentally subsitute the steps in all the commands always bothered me so this is my attempt to change it.

Credits to: Archwiki, Sigboe, kayu.net

Please answer the following setup questions, to get a list of disks it may be useful to run lsblk

Disk:

Disk Size (Gb):

Ram Size (Gb):

Hostname:

Username:

Partitioning

gdisk /dev/nvme0n0

oEnter ↵ to create a new empty GUID partition table (GPT)

yEnter ↵to confirm

nEnter ↵ add a new partition

Enter ↵ to select default partition number of 1

Enter ↵ to select default start at first sector

+512MEnter ↵ make that size partition for booting

ef00Enter ↵ Partition type EFI

n Enter ↵ to add new partition

Enter ↵ to select default partition number of 2

Enter ↵ to select default start of sector

+8G Enter ↵ make that size partition for swap

8200 Enter ↵ to make partition type of swap

n Enter ↵ to add new partition

Enter ↵ to select default partition number of 3

Enter ↵ to select default start of sector

+51G Enter ↵ make that size partition for root

8300 Enter ↵ to make partition type for root

n Enter ↵ to add new partition

Enter ↵ to select default partition number of 4

Enter ↵ to select default start of sector

Enter ↵ to select default end of sector

8300Enter ↵ to make partition type for home

p Enter ↵ if you want to check the partition layout

w Enter ↵ to write changes to disk

y Enter ↵ to confirm

Formatting

The EFI partition

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/nvme0n0p1

The swap

mkswap /dev/nvme0n0p2

The EFI partition

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/nvme0n0p1

The swap

mkswap /dev/nvme0n0p2swapon /dev/nvme0n0p2

The root

mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n0p3

The home

mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n0p4swapon /dev/nvme0n0p2

The root

mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n0p3

The home

mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n0p4

Mounting before Install

Mount root to /mnt (this is the convention while installing)

mount /dev/nvme0n0p3 /mnt

Make a boot and a home folder (two commands in one :) )

mkdir /mnt/{home,boot}

Mount home and boot

mount /dev/nvme0n0p4 /mnt/homemount /dev/nvme0n0p1 /mnt/boot

Installing

Install Arch, some things needed for arch user repository and a text editor.

pacstrap /mnt base linux intel-ucode base-devel sudo vim zsh grml-zsh-config dialog openssl-1.0 git

Generate the fstab

genfstab -pU /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab

Remote control your installation

arch-chroot /mnt /usr/bin/zsh

Configure Boot environment

Then make the initramfs

mkinitcpio -P

Install the bootloader

bootctl install

Edit our boot entry

/boot/loader/entries/arch.conf

Copy and paste the following config:

title Arch Linux linux /vmlinuz-linux initrd /intel-ucode.img initrd /initramfs-linux.img options root=PARTUUID= quiet rw

Move your cursor to the last = after PARTUUID then enter the following to grab the partition's ID and insert it.

:r:r !blkid -s PARTUUID -o value /dev/nvme0n0

Make this the default boot entry

vim /boot/loader/loader.conf

Have the text be

timeout 2 default arch

User/Install and system configuration

Create your user

useradd -m -g users -G wheel,storage,power,video -s /usr/bin/zsharchpasswd arch

Give this user sudo access

visudo

uncomment (delete the #) the line

%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALLsave and exit

set hostname

echo archlinux > /etc/hostname

set your timezone (use your own continent and city)

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime

Configure locale

vim /etc/locale.gen

Uncomment the lines

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 anden_US ISO-8859-1save and exit

generate locales

locale-gen

set language

echo "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf

Desktop Window Manager

(optionally) Install Gnome (while still in chroot)

pacman -S gnome gnome-extra

The `gnome-extra` group is optional but does contain a sensible list of packages that complete the gnome experience. Including an archive manager, disk manager, text editor, and a set of games.

To enable GDM automatially after boot (GDM is included in the gnome group) systemctl enable gdm

(optionally) Install KDE (while still in chroot)

pacman -S plasma-meta kde-applications-meta xf86-video-intel xorg-serverTo enable SDDM automatially after boot (SDDM is included in the plasma group) systemctl enable sddm

Reboot! your system should now be available for use.

Arch User Repository

In a new terminal enter the following

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git cd yay makepkg -si