Archlinux Post Installation

If you are not using Arch, you probably should. There’s a lot to be said about Arch Linux but that’s not the right place: we are here to install what I think it’s basic stuff to get your brand new installation up and running.

Yep. There’s already the official wiki (aka The Bible) guide here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/installation_guide . It’s the place you have to look at, if you’re installing Arch for your first time.

What I’m going to write here is a note to myself for every post-installation package and every setup I need in order to have a beautiful and clean system. I could probably just write a script for doing that every time and maybe I’ll do it in the future, but since this is an always work in progress I’m happy with this for now.

AUR helper

I’m currently using Yay, manually install it from AUR:

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

Enable colors

This will enable color output for both pacman and yay.

    vim /etc/pacman.conf
    # Uncomment the "Color" line

Faster package creation

By default makepkg create the package, the compress it. It is cool if you want to share it to others but probably you (or yay) are just going to install it for yourself - it’s an useless and slow step. We can avoid it like so:

    vim /etc/makepkg.conf
    # Edit the penultimate line to be like:
    # PKGEXT='.pkg.tar'

Blazing fast internet startup

I used NetworkManager for a long time, then I found someone on Reddit suggesting connmanctl because it’s so much faster at startup to connect - and it’s true. So I suggest to install it, together with a simple GUI:

    yay -S connman connman-gtk

    # Be sure to stop and disable NetworkManager or others before!
    sudo systemctl enable connman
    sudo systemctl start connman

You can also start connman-gtk at startup if you want the tray icon.

DE, fonts, etc.

I’m currently using i3wm but I also keep Gnome installed because I like breaking things and I need a backup.

    yay -S gnome gnome-tweaks  # for gnome
    yay -S i3wm-gaps  # for i3wm, with gaps patch
    systemctl enable gdm

My personal dotfile can be found at https://github.com/pitasi/dotfile . They are a constant work in progress so you probably would have to figure out some stuff by yourself - DO NOT JUST COPY PASTE THEM, SOMETHING TERRIBLE WOULD HAPPEN!

Fonts

Some basic fonts you can install

    yay -S noto-fonts-emoji

I also use Terminus as my terminal font because bitmap fonts are sharps and great:

    yay -S terminus-font

You must one of these pixel sizes: [8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16].

Theme

Arc Dark + Papirus icons = ❤️

    sudo pacman -S arc-gtk-theme papirus-icon-theme

Use gnome-tweaks (or maybe lxappearance in i3wm) to select the theme.

Alternative (macOS inspired) icons:

    yay -S la-capitaine-icon-theme

macOS Mojave Dynamic Wallpaper

Check https://github.com/Pitasi/dyn-wallpaper , and its blog post here!

Other packages

Shell

I like Fish shell, so…

    sudo pacman -S fish
    fish
    curl -L https://get.oh-my.fish | fish
    omf install bobthefish
    chsh
    # select /usr/bin/fish

YubiKey support

See my other post