Arch Linux in 2023 – Simple Installation Guide

Prerequisites

Download the latest Arch ISO. I refer to the clickable link on the official releases page or – for German users – you can navigate to archlinux.de/downloads
Check the integrity of the downloaded ISO using the guide you can find on archlinux.org/downloads in the section “HTTP direct downloads”
Configure a bootable USB stick.

After booting your stick and chosing our preferred keyboard layout, you need to connect to the internet

Installing Arch Linux

Boot the USB stick

First, boot the USB stick on the computer where you want to install Arch Linux. You should be seeing below output.

Fig.1 – Console output of succesfully booted USB stick

Load your preferred keyboard layout, for example loadkeys de-latin1 for German.
Connect to a router with a LAN cable directly or connect to your WLAN.

Connecting to WLAN

I use the following commands to wirelessly connect to my router. Each command produces output as you can see in figure 2 below the list.

iwctl
device list
station replace_with_your_device get-networks
station replace_with_your_device connect replace_with_your_WLAN_SSID
exit

Fig.2 – Outputs of iwctl commands when connecting to WLAN

In order to test your connection, you can ping google.com for example. The connection is established if you see ongoing responses of “x bytes received from…”

Archinstall

Run archinstall. You should see the interactive menu in the console (Fig. 3).

Configuration

The following is an exemplary configuration I use. With Arch not everything is handed to you ready-made on a silver platter, yet if you are up for gaining the necessary background knowledge, it will pay out on the long run. Thus, if you stumble across something unfamiliar in the setup options: do some research, fill your knowledge gaps & improve 🙂

Config Option	Value	Additional Info
Archinstall language	your preferred language
Mirrors	region close to you	What you want to install must come from somewhere. Mirrors are servers providing “all the stuff” you need to install Arch Linux. You can chose a mirror close to your location, since geographical proximity means low latency.
Locales	your locale	I chose “de” since I have a German keyboard
Disk configuration	best-effort layout filesystem: ext4	I keep it simple and I am not doing much of manual effort here.
Disk encryption	skip
Bootloader	Systemd-boot	https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-boot
Swap	keep default (True)
Hostname	the name you want for your PC	how about archibald 😉
Root Password	your chosen root password	https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Root
User account	add users as you need it	Since I am the only user I always create one admin user with root privileges
Profile	Desktop: what you prefer, gnome is quite popular	If you do not select “Desktop” here, you will have an installation with a command line only and not with the GUI you are used to whereyou can login and install und use programs like webbrowsers or office programs.
Audio	Pipewire	your choice shouldn’t matter if you are a regular user
Kernels	Linux
Additional packages	Skip	I think I always ended up missing packages. But I tend to install them without a hurry afterwards
Network configuration	Use NetworkManager
Timezone	your timezone	You can use the search to easily select your zone. For me it is Europe/Berlin.
Automatic time sync (NTP)	keep default (True)
Optional repositories	skip