10 ms·

Find Your Footing After Installing Arch Linux

46 points by wonger_ 2y ago

greenavocado 2y ago
Arch Linux is the best distro for KDE enjoyers. I recommend going all in on KDE, especially with its companion app "KDE Connect" on your smartphone
- jraph 2y ago
  openSUSE is quite good as well, any specific reason Arch would be better for KDE than openSUSE?
  - saidinesh5 2y ago
    Dunno about the opensuse variant of rolling release distro (tumbleweed?), but usually You'd want Arch to avoid the 6 month "upgrade to the new version of the distro and find the ppa/user repos for the software i couldn't find in official repos" headaches. Also Arch KDE is more or less upstream, while i remember Suse polishing the theme etc .. Back when i tried it 15 years ago
    - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
      Tumbleweed is really close to upstream and doesn't need extra repos to stay on the latest versions. They do ship their own theme, but vanilla breeze is only a few clicks away. Tumbleweed is mostly tied with Arch in my book for favorite distro. They both have papercuts and things that work better than the other in different areas, but on the whole are very close.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Unfortunately KDE is currently broken on Arch. The screen locker freezes when you wake the screen back up (see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483094 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483094). Hopefully they fix the bug soon but it's been almost a year so I don't have a ton of hope.
  - gh02t 2y ago
    Not using Arch anymore, but I did have this issue recently on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I switched KDE to Wayland (defaulted to X11 for some reason) and the issue went away. Worth a try if you haven't already.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      Thank you for the tip! Unfortunately I can't use Wayland because it breaks the AFK detection in Discord. I would actually prefer to use Wayland, but Discord Linux support is real bad. That said I'll have to take a look because maybe there's a solution that didn't exist last time I tried. And worst case scenario, I can at least decide which bug is less bad.
      - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
        While I can't personally understand why you'd want to give Discord and its advertisers free information about your application usage habits, issues like these are endemic to rather a large number of Electron apps whose developers refuse to keep the framework up-to-date. Supposedly the issues will go away when they upgrade to modern Electron, and then I'll know for sure just how good the Flatpak jails are at blocking that nonsense.
      - gh02t 2y ago
        An off the wall solution might be to bridge Discord to Matrix with https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/discord/index.html https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/discord/index.html and then use a Matrix client, but no idea how well the bridge supports AFK detection as I haven't used the Discord one. Generally the other bridges to Matrix I have used support status and presence pretty seamlessly, though. Don't think any of the bridges support voice chat, however, so depends on what you use Discord for. Also perhaps try Discord in the browser instead of the desktop app? Just some random thoughts to try.
- eklavya 2y ago
  In my opinion the best KDE experience would be KDE neon by the KDE developers. https://neon.kde.org/ https://neon.kde.org/
  - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
    They don't want you to use the full Ubuntu package repos nor any PPAs, though. They expect you to be content with just KDE apps and Flatpak. Flatpak in no way covers my needs on its own, and I got tired of fighting with 3rd-party repos on it. If I have to run Ubuntu and want up-to-date KDE, I run Tuxedo OS. That's what my work laptop is on, and has been pretty great overall. The rest of my machines are on one rolling release or another (Debian Testing, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, or Arch).
- bb88 2y ago
  No need to use KDE to use KDE Connect. Gsconnect works well on ubuntu/gnome and integrates like you'd expect it to. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/
tmtvl 2y ago
Written for laptop users. I'd raise an eyebrow at going with i3 rather than... I don't know... Gnome or KDE or MATE or Cinnamon or Xfce or, well, anything a little more user-friendly.
- wonger_ 2y ago
  FWIW, the author explains his reasoning about desktop environments in the middle of this page: https://ejmastnak.com/tutorials/arch/startx/ https://ejmastnak.com/tutorials/arch/startx/ Basically recommending to start minimal, with the freedom to configure/add things afterwards.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- phito 2y ago
  Agreed, I would never recommend i3 for someone new to arch...
bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
I think new users to linux should skip x11 entirely as it is out of fashion and only adds friction. sway instead of i3 if you insist on tiling wm (i do, but it is a fringe option and another pain point for newbies)
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  Unfortunately, sway is a rather poor tiling wm, no offense to i3 fans. IMO the point of a tiling wm is to make it easier to manage windows, so something that requires manual splitting and rearranging is unacceptable (I may as well manually drag around windows!). Proper automatic tiling wms like dwm and awesome are missing in Wayland. Or, "were" missing, there are now some promising ones like Hyprland but they still have rough edges.
  - akimbostrawman 2y ago
    Not perfect but enough for basics https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/autotiling/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/autotiling/
jraph 2y ago
> Wayland may well replace X in the future, but at the time of writing X is still the de-facto standard for a window system Is it? The article was written end of last year. I believe the most widespread DEs on the most widespread distros now use Wayland by default, don't they? There's now stuff that just works better on Wayland today. I've kept X11 for a very long time, probably until 2023, because of little annoying details, but now it just works. I think the only remaming thing that annoys me is some apps like Kate not coming to the to the foreground when invoked. Things are slowly going to stop working on X11. Perhaps not today, but we are talking about setting up a new Linux install. Especially something like Arch that has all the recent versions.
- 3abiton 2y ago
  I recently got a good laptop with great hardware, so I opted for Wayland (with hyprland). It is still finniky. One main issue is Xwayland dependency that feels a bit warped. Another one is gaming support (Wine still heavily depends on X11). Then you got nvidia. It's a lot of small things. Overall, big improvement since I gave it a try 2 years ago, it's evolving fast, and I would argue nearly "there". But not yet.
  - jraph 2y ago
    > One main issue is Xwayland dependency that feels a bit warped. I believe XWayland is there to stay for retro compatibility. That seems fine to me, retro-compatibility seems like a good thing. That would not be unlike XQuartz on Mac, which doesn't make us question Mac's own display server. > I would argue nearly "there". But not yet. I fully believe there are use case that are not fully covered indeed. Gaming would be one (I don't know whether gaming on Linux, outside the Steam Deck, is actually niche). But doesn't Wine work well with XWayland? (until they fully move to Wayland, which I think I've read they are in the process of doing) I would guess NVidia would concern mainly gamers and people working with ML (maybe those people don't actually need NVidia to display stuff though, and are actually fully covered by the iGPU - I don't know). It seems to me running an actual X11 session is now needed for niche things, but I might be wrong.
astaunton 2y ago
Not a criticism of the article / documents but an observation that aligns with others comments. For new users it is probably not going to be an issue to select a different window manager / desktop experience. Boot Arch ISO Run archinstall select desktop / window manager you wish to install No requirement to manually setup X or Wayland, as the scripts / install will take care of it for you. I also understand that this is not 100% in the ethos of using Arch (where you should really understand all the packages going into your system and how all the configuration is done). I would also include that the following is also a good resource for learning Arch. https://arcolinux.com/ https://arcolinux.com/ (although is is a derivative of Arch this site has alot of documentation that users can learn from)
dark__paladin 2y ago
I still use X11 because it just works. I understand that Wayland is the "latest and greatest", but I genuinely do not understand why I need to upgrade yet. Could someone provide an actual tangible example as to why Wayland is "better" than X11? I've only ever heard hand-wavy explanations.
- kfghkdghje 2y ago
  security: you can think of x11 as being similar to how memory worked back in the dos world. any x11 client can look at the screen content of any other client, can steal/monitor inputs, etc. in wayland you have a framework called Portals that allows you to grant this access on a limited basis and ensure an indicator is displayed when the screen is being recorded/shared performance: holy shit it's so buttery smooth, especially if you're on an intel or amd graphics stack. under x11, it felt like it was impossible to actually eliminate tearing everywhere. under wayland (my experience is limited to sway, gnome, and most recently kde) tearing just ceases to be a thing.
  - Ferret7446 2y ago
    > security Any process you run can already access the memory and files of everything else as the same user. Wayland's security properties are over-sold and practically irrelevant, and it doesn't help that it breaks a ton of functionality that people need in the name of this "security", like screen readers.
    - akimbostrawman 2y ago
      >Any process you run can already access the memory and files of everything else as the same user. *When the applications themselves aren't properly sandboxed. If they are with for example firejail, flatpak or snap. Then x11 is a gaping hole like having proper doors in a house but broken windows. It's not the job of the compositor to sandbox applications.
- ranger207 2y ago
  IME Wayland handles mixed DPI, fractional scaling, and mixed scaling far better than X did, which is important for me since I have a couple of differently sized and different resolution monitors
a-arbabian 2y ago
I switched to Wayland (hyprland) last year and have never regretted it, until I need to load up an Electron app. What a shit framework.
mkesper 2y ago
I applaud the effort but honestly think if I was a new Linux user, this guide would be relatively useless. It lists what to do but gives no hints where to look for these settings.

46 points by wonger_ 2y ago

Arch Linux is the best distro for KDE enjoyers. I recommend going all in on KDE, especially with its companion app "KDE Connect" on your smartphone

jraph 2y ago
openSUSE is quite good as well, any specific reason Arch would be better for KDE than openSUSE?
- saidinesh5 2y ago
  Dunno about the opensuse variant of rolling release distro (tumbleweed?), but usually You'd want Arch to avoid the 6 month "upgrade to the new version of the distro and find the ppa/user repos for the software i couldn't find in official repos" headaches. Also Arch KDE is more or less upstream, while i remember Suse polishing the theme etc .. Back when i tried it 15 years ago
  - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
    Tumbleweed is really close to upstream and doesn't need extra repos to stay on the latest versions. They do ship their own theme, but vanilla breeze is only a few clicks away. Tumbleweed is mostly tied with Arch in my book for favorite distro. They both have papercuts and things that work better than the other in different areas, but on the whole are very close.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
Unfortunately KDE is currently broken on Arch. The screen locker freezes when you wake the screen back up (see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483094 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483094). Hopefully they fix the bug soon but it's been almost a year so I don't have a ton of hope.
- gh02t 2y ago
  Not using Arch anymore, but I did have this issue recently on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I switched KDE to Wayland (defaulted to X11 for some reason) and the issue went away. Worth a try if you haven't already.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    Thank you for the tip! Unfortunately I can't use Wayland because it breaks the AFK detection in Discord. I would actually prefer to use Wayland, but Discord Linux support is real bad. That said I'll have to take a look because maybe there's a solution that didn't exist last time I tried. And worst case scenario, I can at least decide which bug is less bad.
    - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
      While I can't personally understand why you'd want to give Discord and its advertisers free information about your application usage habits, issues like these are endemic to rather a large number of Electron apps whose developers refuse to keep the framework up-to-date. Supposedly the issues will go away when they upgrade to modern Electron, and then I'll know for sure just how good the Flatpak jails are at blocking that nonsense.
    - gh02t 2y ago
      An off the wall solution might be to bridge Discord to Matrix with https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/discord/index.html https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/discord/index.html and then use a Matrix client, but no idea how well the bridge supports AFK detection as I haven't used the Discord one. Generally the other bridges to Matrix I have used support status and presence pretty seamlessly, though. Don't think any of the bridges support voice chat, however, so depends on what you use Discord for. Also perhaps try Discord in the browser instead of the desktop app? Just some random thoughts to try.
eklavya 2y ago
In my opinion the best KDE experience would be KDE neon by the KDE developers. https://neon.kde.org/ https://neon.kde.org/
- MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
  They don't want you to use the full Ubuntu package repos nor any PPAs, though. They expect you to be content with just KDE apps and Flatpak. Flatpak in no way covers my needs on its own, and I got tired of fighting with 3rd-party repos on it. If I have to run Ubuntu and want up-to-date KDE, I run Tuxedo OS. That's what my work laptop is on, and has been pretty great overall. The rest of my machines are on one rolling release or another (Debian Testing, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, or Arch).
bb88 2y ago
No need to use KDE to use KDE Connect. Gsconnect works well on ubuntu/gnome and integrates like you'd expect it to. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/

tmtvl 2y ago

Written for laptop users. I'd raise an eyebrow at going with i3 rather than... I don't know... Gnome or KDE or MATE or Cinnamon or Xfce or, well, anything a little more user-friendly.

wonger_ 2y ago
FWIW, the author explains his reasoning about desktop environments in the middle of this page: https://ejmastnak.com/tutorials/arch/startx/ https://ejmastnak.com/tutorials/arch/startx/ Basically recommending to start minimal, with the freedom to configure/add things afterwards.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
phito 2y ago
Agreed, I would never recommend i3 for someone new to arch...

bdhcuidbebe 2y ago

I think new users to linux should skip x11 entirely as it is out of fashion and only adds friction. sway instead of i3 if you insist on tiling wm (i do, but it is a fringe option and another pain point for newbies)

Ferret7446 2y ago
Unfortunately, sway is a rather poor tiling wm, no offense to i3 fans. IMO the point of a tiling wm is to make it easier to manage windows, so something that requires manual splitting and rearranging is unacceptable (I may as well manually drag around windows!). Proper automatic tiling wms like dwm and awesome are missing in Wayland. Or, "were" missing, there are now some promising ones like Hyprland but they still have rough edges.
- akimbostrawman 2y ago
  Not perfect but enough for basics https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/autotiling/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/autotiling/

jraph 2y ago

> Wayland may well replace X in the future, but at the time of writing X is still the de-facto standard for a window system Is it? The article was written end of last year. I believe the most widespread DEs on the most widespread distros now use Wayland by default, don't they? There's now stuff that just works better on Wayland today. I've kept X11 for a very long time, probably until 2023, because of little annoying details, but now it just works. I think the only remaming thing that annoys me is some apps like Kate not coming to the to the foreground when invoked. Things are slowly going to stop working on X11. Perhaps not today, but we are talking about setting up a new Linux install. Especially something like Arch that has all the recent versions.

3abiton 2y ago
I recently got a good laptop with great hardware, so I opted for Wayland (with hyprland). It is still finniky. One main issue is Xwayland dependency that feels a bit warped. Another one is gaming support (Wine still heavily depends on X11). Then you got nvidia. It's a lot of small things. Overall, big improvement since I gave it a try 2 years ago, it's evolving fast, and I would argue nearly "there". But not yet.
- jraph 2y ago
  > One main issue is Xwayland dependency that feels a bit warped. I believe XWayland is there to stay for retro compatibility. That seems fine to me, retro-compatibility seems like a good thing. That would not be unlike XQuartz on Mac, which doesn't make us question Mac's own display server. > I would argue nearly "there". But not yet. I fully believe there are use case that are not fully covered indeed. Gaming would be one (I don't know whether gaming on Linux, outside the Steam Deck, is actually niche). But doesn't Wine work well with XWayland? (until they fully move to Wayland, which I think I've read they are in the process of doing) I would guess NVidia would concern mainly gamers and people working with ML (maybe those people don't actually need NVidia to display stuff though, and are actually fully covered by the iGPU - I don't know). It seems to me running an actual X11 session is now needed for niche things, but I might be wrong.

astaunton 2y ago

Not a criticism of the article / documents but an observation that aligns with others comments. For new users it is probably not going to be an issue to select a different window manager / desktop experience. Boot Arch ISO Run archinstall select desktop / window manager you wish to install No requirement to manually setup X or Wayland, as the scripts / install will take care of it for you. I also understand that this is not 100% in the ethos of using Arch (where you should really understand all the packages going into your system and how all the configuration is done). I would also include that the following is also a good resource for learning Arch. https://arcolinux.com/ https://arcolinux.com/ (although is is a derivative of Arch this site has alot of documentation that users can learn from)

dark__paladin 2y ago

I still use X11 because it just works. I understand that Wayland is the "latest and greatest", but I genuinely do not understand why I need to upgrade yet. Could someone provide an actual tangible example as to why Wayland is "better" than X11? I've only ever heard hand-wavy explanations.

kfghkdghje 2y ago
security: you can think of x11 as being similar to how memory worked back in the dos world. any x11 client can look at the screen content of any other client, can steal/monitor inputs, etc. in wayland you have a framework called Portals that allows you to grant this access on a limited basis and ensure an indicator is displayed when the screen is being recorded/shared performance: holy shit it's so buttery smooth, especially if you're on an intel or amd graphics stack. under x11, it felt like it was impossible to actually eliminate tearing everywhere. under wayland (my experience is limited to sway, gnome, and most recently kde) tearing just ceases to be a thing.
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  > security Any process you run can already access the memory and files of everything else as the same user. Wayland's security properties are over-sold and practically irrelevant, and it doesn't help that it breaks a ton of functionality that people need in the name of this "security", like screen readers.
  - akimbostrawman 2y ago
    >Any process you run can already access the memory and files of everything else as the same user. *When the applications themselves aren't properly sandboxed. If they are with for example firejail, flatpak or snap. Then x11 is a gaping hole like having proper doors in a house but broken windows. It's not the job of the compositor to sandbox applications.
ranger207 2y ago
IME Wayland handles mixed DPI, fractional scaling, and mixed scaling far better than X did, which is important for me since I have a couple of differently sized and different resolution monitors

a-arbabian 2y ago

I switched to Wayland (hyprland) last year and have never regretted it, until I need to load up an Electron app. What a shit framework.

mkesper 2y ago

I applaud the effort but honestly think if I was a new Linux user, this guide would be relatively useless. It lists what to do but gives no hints where to look for these settings.