Arch Linux Installation Guide (2026 Edition)

Arch Linux is one of the most popular Linux distributions out there. It's also one of the quickest and easiest to install. Today, I'm going to run through a traditional Arch Linux installation using the command line install process. I'm going to install Arch Linux. I'm going to install the base packages, the Linux kernel. I'm going to install the Neri window manager, which is a Wayland compositor, so it's going to pull in Wayland for the display server. We're going to partition the drive. I'm going to use ButterFS as our file system, and I'm going to use ZRAM for a swap. I'm going to show you how to do all of that, and this installation process is going to take 15 minutes or less, so go ahead and set a timer. The first thing you need to do is you need to go get the ISO for Arch Linux. Go to archlinux.org and click on the download page here, and then on the download page, there's a couple of different methods to go and get the ISO. You can get it through a torrent, or you can just do a direct download from several mirrors here. I've already downloaded the ISO, so I'm going to go ahead and install Arch Linux. I'm going to run through an installation inside a virtual machine, but the installation process is very similar whether it's a physical machine or a virtual machine, so I'm going to open vert manager. That's what I use for my virtual machines, and I'm going to go ahead and create a virtual machine. Let's browse my local downloads directory for the Arch Linux ISO. There it is, and it has detected that that ISO is in fact Arch Linux. I'm I'll give it two cores of my 24 core CPU, and then 20 gigs of disk space is fine, and I will name this archlinux-install, and then I'm going to click finish here, and away we go. Let's go ahead and make this full screen, and now we come to the command prompt. Now because I'm doing this on camera, and I know you guys are going to have a problem reading the text, I'm going to go ahead and change the font size here in the tty. So I'm going to run the command set font space, and then this particular font tr-v32b makes us a much bigger font now. First thing you need to do is ensure your system clock is accurate by syncing it with network time servers, and you use this command here time-datectl set-ntp to true. Next we need to partition our drive, and I'm going to use this particular program here. I'm going to go ahead and use a cfdisk. Cfdisk is capable of doing both GPT and DOS partition tables, so UEFI and legacy BIOS. We're going to do UEFI today because I think that's what almost everybody is on these days. So we need to choose a GPT label, and then free space. Now the first thing we need to do is we need to create a EFI system partition, and it needs to be about 512 megabytes. So I'm going to click on new partition. It needs to be 512m for 512 megabytes. Hit enter, and the partition type by default, it defaults to Linux file system. We need to change that, so I'm going to move over to type, and I'm going to move up in the menu to EFI system, and now we've got that, and then arrow down the free space that's available. I'm going to make a new partition. I'm going to give the partition all of the available space that's remaining, and then the type Linux file system is correct. So let's go ahead, and I'm going to move over to write. Let me actually move my head out of the way. We need to write, and it's going to ask you to confirm it by typing the full word yes, and then after that you hit quit, and you're back at the command line. Next we need to make the file systems. So the EFI partition needs to be a FAT32 file system. So let's MKFS for make file system dot FAT, and then dash capital F32 for FAT32 slash dev slash, in this case, I know it's going to be VDA1 in my virtual machine for the partition. Now for you, you may need to figure out what the partition is. You could do a LSBOK and find out what the partitions, but this virtual machine always creates them as VDA1, VDA2. So for me, MKFS dot FAT dash capital F32, and then slash dev slash VDA1, and that creates the FAT32 EFI partition, and then I'm going to up arrow, and I'm going to run this command make file system dot BTRFS. So we're going to make a butter FS partition. We're going to give it this flag dash L. We're going to give it a label arch root, and then the device is slash dev slash VDA2. In this case, it's the second partition, and that made our butter FS partition. But since we chose butter FS, butter FS, you typically want to set up with sub volumes. You want to be able to create snapshots at some point. So let's go ahead and take care of all of that. So I'm going to mount my butter FS partition, which in my case is slash dev slash VDA2, and I'm going to mount it to slash MNT. And then next I'm going to do this command here, butter FS space sub volume create, and then slash MNT slash, and then the at symbol. Next, I'm going to hit the up arrow key here and rerun this command. This time I'm going to create slash MNT at home, and then I'm going to up arrow, and this time create a slash MNT at snapshots, and then one more time up arrow, and this time MNT slash at bar underscore log. Now we need to go ahead and unmount. So do a U mount space and then slash MNT to unmount. And then we're going to mount again. We had to unmount to mount again, because now we need to mount them properly after creating the sub volume. So we're going to mount dash O, and then we're going to give it a bunch of flags. No at time, comma, no spaces between this. Compress equals ZSZSTD, and then comma, and then sub ball equals at, and then a space slash dev slash GDA2 is my butter FS partition space slash MNT. That's where we're going to mount it to. Next, we want to create some directories. So I'm going to make gear dash P. So we're going to create these directories and all the parent directories if needed, and we need to make slash MNT. So mount slash, and then we're going to do this inside braces because this will be a brace expansion. We're going to create several directories. We're going to create a mount slash boot, comma, slash home, comma, dot snapshots, comma, and then finally var slash log. And if I did that correctly, let's go ahead and list slash MNT to see if those directories exist. They do. And now we need to mount all of those directories we just created, and there were four of them. So I'm going to up arrow a couple of times until I get, remember this command here where we mounted a VDA2 to slash mount. Well, now what we need to do is we're going to rerun a similar command. Let me scroll over sub volume at needs to be at home. So this time we're going to do at home and then slash MNT slash home. And let me hit enter on that. I'm going to up arrow, and now we need to do the snapshots. So this will be at snapshots because that was the mount point we created. And then the mount point is slash MNT slash dot snapshots was the directory we created. And then up arrow and the next sub volume that we need to take care of here is var underscore log. And then that mount point is at slash MNT slash var slash log. And then finally let's mount slash dev slash VDA1, which is our EFI partition that needs to be mounted at our newly created slash mount slash boot. Now we can verify all of this for the LSBOK dash F, and that gives us our file system. Of course I'm zoomed in, so it may be kind of hard to read. Another command you could do here is butter FS sub volume space list, and then slash MNT. And there are our sub volumes there. And that really is the most complicated part is setting up the partitions and the sub volumes for butter FS. Let's go ahead and do a quick base install. Now I'm already mounted into VDA2 slash MNT, so let's go ahead and run the basic packstrap command. So what this will do, this will install the base arch system. So you packstrap slash MNT and then install certain packages like base, which is the base packages Linux, which is your kernel Linux dash firmware, which is very important. I'm going to install a couple of other packages I know I'm going to need, so I might as well do them now, sudo and vim, because I need a proper text editor. And now it's going to install all of the base system plus sudo and vim. This will take a couple of minutes. Well, that installation went very quick. It only took about a minute to install those packages. And next we need to chroot into our new installation. So I'm going to run the command arch dash chroot to change the root file system over into slash MNT. That is where our future Arch Linux installation is mounted to. First, let's set the time zone. So we need to run time date CTL and then list dash time zones. Now this gives you a list of all the available time zones on the system. For me, I know mine is America slash Chicago. I don't live in Chicago, but Chicago is in the central time zone. I'm in the central time zone. So if you're unsure about your region slash city, because you need that region slash city and you need to get that information and then you need to run the time date CTL command set dash time zone and then region slash city. So for me, America slash Chicago. And if it doesn't give you an error message, it was set correctly. Next, we need to set the hardware clock. So do H W C L O C K. So hardware clock dash dash sys T O H C and then hit enter. And that's all you need to do there. And then let's go ahead and set the locale. So nano is on the system. You can use nano as your editor. For me, I'm going to use Vim because that's why I installed it. And I'm going to use Vim slash Etsy slash locale dot gen is the file we need to edit. And I need to search for a specific locale to uncomment. Every line in this file is commented. I'm going to search for English underscore us. So let's go down to that line and there it is. And I just need to uncomment that and then let me write and quit. And now we set English us to our locale. Of course, that just changes a line in the file to actually set it. We need to run the command locale dash gen. One final file I want to edit is the slash Etsy slash locale dot comp, which is an empty file. And I need to do Lang, all caps, equals, and then EN underscore US dot UTF dash eight, and then write and quit out of that. Next, let's set our host name. So I'm going to Vim slash Etsy slash host name. This is the file that contains the host name of the computer. I'm going to call this computer Arch. So that will be the host name of the computer. Next, I'm going to up arrow and this file already exists and it's correct. There's no need to edit this. In old days, this used to not be a file that contains stuff. You actually had to write all of this yourself. Now you don't. So great. Nothing to do there. Next, let's set our passwords. Right now, of course, I'm logged in as the root user. The root user is the only user on the system. So let's go ahead and set his password. Let's do pass WD to set the password. I'm going to give the root user a strong and complicated password. Hit enter, retype the password. There we go. Now let's go ahead and create our normal user. I'm going to do a user add dash M DT is my normal username, right? So now we need to go ahead and create a password for DT. So pass WD space DT to create DT's password. Confirm. And we set his password. We need to make sure DT is actually added to some groups on the system. So we're going to do a user mod dash lowercase a capital G to add him to some groups. We're going to add him to these groups. Wheel, audio, video. It's very important. No spaces here. And then optical, storage, input, and then finally space DT. DT's the user we're adding all of this to. And there we go. Now remember earlier, we installed sudo. We need to make sure that DT has sudo privileges. We added him to the wheel group. So that gives him sudo privileges, but only if we allow every member of the wheel group to have sudo privileges. And to do that, we need to run the command VI sudo to get into the sudoers file. And we need to scroll down to the line where we find wheel. We could actually just search for wheel. There we go. This is the line right here. And it says uncomment to allow members of the wheel group to execute any command. So let's go ahead and uncomment that and then write and quit. Next, let's go ahead and install a package called ZRAM dash generator because we haven't set up the swap yet. I'm going to use ZRAM as a swap. So pacman dash capital S ZRAM generator. And let's go ahead and install that. And then I need to vim slash etsy slash systemd slash and then ZRAM dash generator dot comp is the file. And we need to actually write this file ourselves. So at the top inside brackets, we need to write ZRAM zero. And then next line we need to do ZRAM dash size equals and it's going to equal our RAM divided by two. So the ZRAM size is half of our RAM size. Next line is compression dash algorithm. If I can type that correctly equals ZSTD is the standard algorithm compression. Next is swap dash priority equals 100. And then finally mount dash point equals slash dev slash ZRAM zero. And then write and quit out of that. Now later we will need to actually enable ZRAM through system CTL through systemd. But we can't do that right now inside this rooted environment. But we'll do that at the end. Next up, let's go ahead and install grub because we need a boot loader. So let's pacman dash capital S grub. And because we're doing EFI, let's also install EFI boot MGR EFI boot manager. Let's install those two packages. We need to make dir so we need to make another directory dash P and this needs to be at slash boot slash EFI. That's our EFI partition there. And then finally mount slash dev slash vda1 is our EFI partition. We need to mount that to slash boot slash EFI. And then this command here the grub install command to install grub space dash dash target equals x86 underscore 64 dash EFI space dash dash EFI dash directory equals slash boot slash EFI and then space dash dash boot loader dash ID equals grub all caps very lengthy command but it's important we get this right and no error reported and then finally we need to run the grub dash make config command so grub mkconfig dash o and that needs to be at boot slash grub slash grub dot cfg. Now let's actually install some packages and like graphical packages and stuff. First for networking I know I want network manager so I'm pacman dash capital s network manager. It just makes getting internet and wi-fi and everything set up so much easier. I'm going to install sddm which is going to be our login manager. Let's just install those two packages for now and now that we've done that I don't think we can enable them in this cherooted environment but let's see network manager with a capital n and a capital m and yeah it can't create that because systemd is not running so we've got to do this outside of the cherooted environment. I'll remember to enable that here in a minute. We also need to make sure that we enable zram in a minute as well so we've got a lot of systemd services to enable here in a minute but let's continue with pacman dash capital s. Let's install everything we need so I'm going to go ahead and install base govel because I know I'm going to need that. I'm going to need git as well. Base govel and git are needed if you ever plan on installing anything from the aur because it has to be able to build packages and base govel contains a lot of the make tools. Git of course is how it downloads things so we need those two packages. Let's go ahead and install the aur helper. Let me go ahead and su over into the dt user because you can't install aur packages as root. You have to be a normal user so I'm going to switch over to my dt user and I need to switch over to his home directory so I need to just hit the cd command and if I do print working directory I am in slash home slash dt. Let's go ahead and run a git clone https colon slash slash aur dot arch linux dot org slash yay dot get. Let's install the yay aur helper. So that just cloned the yay directory so let's cd into yay and then let's run the command make pkg make package dash si and this makes the yay binary package. It installs it for us as well. You need to give it sudo privileges at the end to install the package and yay finished installing and then finally what I need to do is now I need to do a sudo pacman double s because I have to use sudo now that I'm the dt user and I'm going to install this list of packages. I'm going to install alacrity for the terminal then my window manager will be niri pcmanfm for a file manager and then various other utilities quickshell sway bg for setting wallpaper sway idle to put my screens to sleep sway lock for lock screen some font families as well as some desktop portals. I'm going to use the gnome desktop portal and the weyland wl roots portal as well. Let's go ahead and run that give my sudo password and away we go and then I need to install some aur packages that are very important to me brave is my browser dms is the dank material shell for niri which I love and then the microsoft fonts and then way paper for being able to set wallpaper in a wayland compositor so I'm going to run all of that and all of that installed correctly finally we need to exit out of the root so let's hit exit I might need to exit a couple of times because I was logged in as dt so my exit exited back out to the root user and then one more exit gets us back to root at archiso now I am still mounted if I do a lsb okay you can see I'm still mounted let's do a umount to unmount dash l for a lazy unmount and now we're unmounted what I want to do is I want to go ahead and reboot the machine and when it reboots let's just make sure grub is working and if it everything is working then finally the last thing I need to do is enable those systemd services so we get a prompt let me log in as my dt user I get an error that his home directory doesn't exist I need to do something about that let me change the tty font to something uh different here so you guys can see the command I need to make dt's user so I need to go ahead and uh sudo make gear slash home dt and now we've made his home user so I won't get that error message anymore and then finally let's go ahead and enable those systemd services so sudo systemctl we need to go ahead and start slash dev slash zram zero that's our zram swap and then gonna up arrow sudo systemctl let's go ahead and enable dash dash now network manager and again capital n capital m and then finally let's go ahead systemctl enable sddm for our login manager and now let's reboot and see if it boots us directly into sddm and we get our login manager so let's see if we can log into niri and we get a black screen I'm assuming that's going to be a virtual machine graphics driver problem but let's go ahead and solve the virtual machine problem because some of you guys are probably going to install this invert manager so let me force off the machine here let's go into the settings I know what the problem is so let's go into the settings we need to make sure our device driver is virtio it needs 3d acceleration so let's turn that on also go to display spice and make sure that listen type is none and let's turn on the open gl let's hit apply let's go ahead and restart the machine make it full screen and now let's go ahead and log into niri and there we go niri it's not set up it's not configured in any way there's no way you would be able to just immediately use niri and do anything you've got a terminal and some other basic stuff I installed the brave browser but you'd have to do a lot of configuration from this point but this was just the basic command line arch linux installation from there you go ahead and tweak things you configure it to your liking but this arch linux installation this command line manual way of installing arch linux it's not nearly as hard as people make it out to be and I have no idea if this installation process came out to 15 minutes I talk a little bit I ramble on but this was pretty quick right this is not something that's going to take even if you take your time reading the arch linux wiki this definitely should not take more than about half an hour for most people now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode matt steve george darloff lee mark methos erjan peace archimedor roland wargen 2 and abuntu and willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick little episode about installing arch linux the archway would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my supporters over on patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work and want to see more videos about linux and free and open source software subscribe to distro tube over on patreon peace guys