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(Works with Arch ISO Image build as of: 2024.01.*)

Arch Linux with KDE Plasma Installation Guide (UEFI & MBR)

Hello everyone, This is my guide for installing minimal Arch Linux with KDE Plasma Desktop Environment. In this guide we will go step by step on how I install my Arch System and set everything up from scratch for a stable & healthy OS.

Table of Contents


Let's begin!

  • Grab the latest built ISO Image from Arch Linux Download and write it to an empty USB Stick.
  • After the image is done writing, restart your computer and hold one of the following keys: Del, F12, F9, F7, Option
  • Your computer will then prompt you to select a bootable device
  • Select the bootable USB stick and your computer should show a range of options
  • Select "Arch Linux Install medium" and wait to be booted into the ArchISO

If your computer doesn't recognise the USB stick or throws an error when trying to boot into it, you likely has Secure Boot on. Go into your BIOS settings and disable Secure Boot.

Tip: Hit CTRL+L to quickly clear the screen

Connect to the internet

Firstly, use the command:

iwctl

To see which networks stations you have installed, use the command:

device list

Select a station from the ones listed and power it on by using the command:

device [selected station] set-property Powered on

Use the command above to turn on its corresponding adapter, only replacing "device" with "adapter" Then, you may either scan for networks or connect through WPS.

WPS

Use the following command:

wsc [selected station] push-button

And push the WPS button at the back of your router. This may take a minute or two to complete. Once the WPS LED stops flashing, your computer has been connected to the internet!

Regular method

Use the following command to scan for all of the access points you can currently connect to:

station [selected station] scan

Then, to display the networks, use the following command:

station [selected station] get-networks

Select an access point from the list provided and connect to it by using the following command:

station [selected station] connect [SSID]

IWCTL will prompt you to enter the access point's passphrase. Enter it and you should be connected to the internet soon after.

Load Keymaps (for non US-ENG Keyboard Users only)

For a list of all the available keymaps, use the command:

localectl list-keymaps

To search for a keymap, use the following command, replacing [search_term] with the code for your language, country, or layout:

localectl list-keymaps | grep -i [search_term]

Now Loadkeys

loadkeys [keymap]

Check for Internet Connectivity

ping -c 4 google.com
  • If you are connected through Ethernet, then your Internet will be working out of the box.
  • If you are using Wi-Fi, then use wifi-menu to connect to your local network.
  • If this step is successful then we will head to next one.

Update system clock

timedatectl set-ntp true

Preparing the Disk for System

⚠️ Be extremely careful when managing your disks, incase you delete your precious data then DON'T blame me.

Disk Partitioning

We are going to make two partitions on our HDD, EFI BOOT & ROOT using gdisk.

  • IMPORTANT: Do not make a /boot partition if you are installing on an MBR system
  • If you have a brand new HDD or if no partition table is found, then create GPT Partition Table by pressing g.
gdisk /dev/[disk name] # If you are on an EFI system
fdisk /dev/[disk name] # If you are on an MBR system
  • [disk name] = device to partition, find yours by running lsblk, this shows all the mountpoints and partitions of a disk.
  • We will be using separate partitions for our /, /boot, /swap & /home.
  • Firstly, we will initialise the disk by using the commands below:

If you are on an EFI system:

x - Expert command
z - "Zap" the disk
y - Blank our MBR (Fully initialises the disk)

If you are on an MBR system:

q - To quit
sfdisk --delete /dev/[disk name]

Then, run gdisk or fdisk again.

n = New Partition
simply press enter = 1st Partition
simply press enter = As First Sector
+1G = As Last sector (BOOT Partition Size)
ef00 = EFI Partition Type

n = New Partition
simply press enter = 2nd Partition
simply press enter = As First Sector
+16G = As Last sector (SWAP size, or double your RAM, whichever is smaller)
8200 = Linux Swap

n = New Partition
simply press enter = 3rd Partition
simply press enter = As First Sector
+40G = As Last sector [ROOT Partition Size (you may use 20GiB if you have a small hard drive)]
8300 or simply press enter = Linux filesystem

n = New Parition
simply press enter = 4th Partition
simply press enter = As first sector
simply press enter = As last sector [HOME parition size (takes up remaining hard drive space)]
8300 or simply press enter = Linux filesystem

w = write & exit

It is ABSOLUTELY recommended to make a home partitition, for both security and convenience if you do decide to distro-hop
IMPORTANT: From now on, your disk will be referred to as sdx, with x being the letter representing your drive.

Format Partitions

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdx1
mkswap /dev/sdx2
mkfs.btrfs /dev/sdx3 # Add -f if your system tells you another filesystem like ext4 is already present
mkfs.btrfs /dev/sdx4

Turn on swap memory

swapon /dev/sdx2

Mount Partitions and turn on swap memory

mount /dev/sdx3 /mnt 
mount --mkdir /dev/sdx1 /mnt/boot/efi
mount --mkdir /dev/sdx4 /mnt/home

Base System Installation

Update Mirrors using Reflector (optional but recommended for faster download speeds, slow download speeds can time out)

reflector -c County1 -c Country2 -a 12 -p https --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Replace Country1 & Country2 with countries near to you or with the one you're living in. Refer to Reflector for more info.

Example:

reflector -c 'United States' -a 12 -p https --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Install base system

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware linux-headers nano intel-ucode reflector mtools dosfstools
  • Replace linux with linux-hardened, linux-lts or linux-zen to install the kernel of your choice.
  • Replace linux-headers with Kernel type type of your choice respectively (e.g if you installed linux-zen then you will need linux-zen-headers).
  • Replace nano with editor of your choice (i.e vim or vi).
  • Replace intel-ucode with amd-ucode if you are using an AMD Processor.

Generate fstab

(use -U or -L to define by UUID or labels, respectively)

genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Check the resulting /mnt/etc/fstab file, and edit it in case of errors.

Chroot

arch-chroot /mnt

Set Time & Date

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Region/City /etc/localtime
hwclock --systohc

Replace Region & City according to your Time zone. To see what timezones are available, use the following commands:

ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/

and

ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/[Region]

An example of this would be:

/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London

Set Language

We will use en_US.UTF-8 here but, if you want to set your language, replace en_US.UTF-8 with yours in all below instances.

Edit locale.gen

nano /etc/locale.gen

Uncomment the below line

#en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

save & exit.

Generate Locale

locale-gen

Add LANG to locale.conf

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

Add Keymaps to vconsole

For keyboard users with non US Eng only. Replace [keymap] with yours.

echo "KEYMAP=[keymap]" > /etc/vconsole.conf

Set Hostname

echo arch > /etc/hostname

Replace arch with hostname of your choice.

Set Hosts

nano /etc/hosts

add these lines to it

127.0.0.1    localhost
::1          localhost
127.0.1.1    arch.localdomain arch

Replace arch with hostname of your choice. save & exit.

Install & Enable NetworkManager

pacman -S networkmanager
systemctl enable NetworkManager

Set ROOT Password

passwd

Installling the bootloader

The bootloader is what manages the boot process, and is the PID 0 of your Arch system.
For MBR systems, we will install GRUB and for UEFI system, we will install SystemD-Boot

Installing GRUB (MBR)

"Targets" are CPU architechtures. These are important for grub to know so it can handle the boot proess correctly.
Find your CPU architechture from this site and specify that as the target

pacman -S grub
grub-install /dev/[disk name] # You don't need to specify a target because the default is i386-pc
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Install EFI Boot manager and SystemD-Boot (UEFI)

pacman -S efibootmgr
bootctl --path=/mnt/boot install

Final Step

exit
umount -a
reboot

Now boot into your freshly installed Arch system

Login as "root" and enter root password when prompted

Add new User

useradd -mG wheel [username]

Replace [username] with your username of choice.

Set User Password

passwd [username]

Repeat the above process as many times as you want, depending on the amount of users you want to add to your system.
If you do not want a user to use sudo commands, use the below command instead:

useradd -m [username]

Allow Wheel Group to use Sudo Commands

EDITOR=nano visudo

Find and uncomment the below line

#%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

save & exit.

Logout of "root"

exit

Login as USER and let's connect to the internet again!

Since we're now using NetworkManager instead of iwd, our connection settings have been lost (and the connection process is slightly different)
Firstly, to take a look at what network stations you have installed on your computer, use the command:

nmcli device

Then, we turn on wifi by using the command:

nmcli radio wifi on

And we list local access points by using the command:

nmcli device wifi list

Select one of the access points listed and connect to it by running the following command:

nmcli device wifi connect [Access Point SSID] password [Access Point Password]

You don't need to check for updates as Arch will have already downloaded the latest version of Arch Linux

You can stop here if you want to do a server installation or have a desktop-less Arch system for any other reason.

Xorg & GPU Drivers

sudo pacman -S xorg [xf86-video-your gpu type]
  • For Nvidia GPUs, type nvidia & nvidia-settings. For more info/old GPUs, refer to Arch Wiki - Nvidia.
  • For newer AMD GPUs, type xf86-video-amdgpu.
  • For legacy Radeon GPUs like HD 7xxx Series & below, type xf86-video-ati.
  • For dedicated Intel Graphics, type xf86-video-intel.

Enable Multilib Repo (optional but absolutely recommended)

multilib contains 32-bit software and libraries that can be used to run and build 32-bit applications on 64-bit installs (e.g. Wine, Steam, etc).

Edit /etc/pacman.conf & uncomment the below two lines.

#[multilib]
#Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

MESA Libraries (32bit) (optional but highly recommmended)

This package is required by Steam if you play games using Vulkan Backend.

sudo pacman -S lib32-mesa

Install & Enable SDDM

sudo pacman -S sddm
sudo systemctl enable sddm

KDE Plasma & Applications

sudo pacman -S plasma konsole dolphin ark kwrite kcalc spectacle krunner partitionmanager packagekit-qt5
Packages Description
plasma KDE Plasma Desktop Environment.
konsole KDE Terminal.
dolphin KDE File Manager.
ark Archiving Tool.
kwrite Text Editor.
kcalc Scientific Calculator.
spectacle KDE screenshot capture utility.
krunner KDE Quick drop-down desktop search.
partitionmanager KDE Disk & Partion Manager.

Audio Utilities & Bluetooth (optional but recommended)

sudo pacman -S alsa-utils bluez bluez-utils
Packages Description
alsa-utils This contains (among other utilities) the alsamixer and amixer utilities.
bluez Provides the Bluetooth protocol stack.
bluez-utils Provides the bluetoothctl utility.

Enable Bluetooth Service

sudo systemctl enable bluetooth.service

Apps I would personally recommend installing but aren't required

You can install all the following packages or only the one you want.

sudo pacman -S firefox openssh qbittorrent audacious wget screen git neofetch
Packages Description
firefox Mozilla Firefox Web Browser.
openssh Secure Shell access server.
qbittorrent Qt-based BitTorrent Client.
audacious Qt-based music player.
wget* Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web.
screen Is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.
git* Github command-line utility tools. (needed to access the AUR)
fastfetch Fastfetch is a command-line system information tool, that is the sucessor to NeoFetch.
cups* Printer service

* - These are some of the more important packages, which a lot of programs tend to use. They're optional but it is highly recommended to install both of them.

Enable OpenSSH daemon and CUPS printer service

sudo systemctl enable sshd.service
sudo systemctl enable --now cups.service

Final Reboot

reboot

The Conclusion

Now everything is installed and after the final reboot, you will land in the SDDM greeter. You can continue reading for some steps to further improve your experience. I recommend you to install yay & paccache.

  • Yay will provide your packages from AUR (Arch User Repository), which are not available in the official repos.
  • Paccache can be used clean pacman cached packages either manually or in an automated way.

Extras (optional but worth a read)

Install Yay

Yet Another Yogurt - An AUR Helper. A lot of programs written for Arch can be founded in the AUR, but be careful of what you download from there.

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

Install NuShell

NuShell is a powerful shell that has really helpful debug statements and is overall a solid shell environment.

yay -S nushell

Install Zsh

Zsh is a powerful shell that operates as both an interactive shell and as a scripting language interpreter. It's a preferred shell environment by many.

sudo pacman -S zsh zsh-completions

Read here for customisation & theming for Zsh. Read below how to change your SHELL.

Changing your SHELL

First check your current SHELL by running:

echo $SHELL

To get list of all available/installed SHELLs:

chsh -l

Set NuShell or Zsh as our SHELL

For an example, we will set Zsh as default SHELL which we installed in the last step:

chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh # To set Zsh as the default SHELL
chsh -s /usr/bin/nu # To set NuShell as the default SHELL

For the changes to apply, you will have Logout and Log back in or better do reboot.

PipeWire

PipeWire is a new low-level multimedia framework. It aims to offer capture and playback for both audio and video with minimal latency and support for PulseAudio, JACK, ALSA and GStreamer-based applications.

Install

sudo pacman -S pipewire wireplumber pipewire-audio pipewire-alsa pipewire-pulse

EasyEffects

EasyEffects (former PulseEffects) is a GTK utility which provides a large array of audio effects and filters to individual application output streams and microphone input streams. Notable effects include an input/output equalizer, output loudness equalization and bass enhancement, and input de-esser and noise reduction plug-in. Install

sudo pacman -S easyeffects
# or
yay -S easyeffects-git

This will also install pipewire-pulse and replace PulseAudio with PipeWire.

ClamAV

Clam AntiVirus is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool for automatic database updates.

1. Install

sudo pacman -S clamav

2. Update Signatures/Database (must do)

sudo freshclam

3. Enable & start services

sudo systemctl enable --now clamav-freshclam.service
sudo systemctl enable --now clamav-daemon.service

4a. ClamTK (optional)

GUI for ClamAV

sudo pacman -S clamtk

4b. KDE Dolphin File Manager Plugin (optional)

Download the latest master zip from ClanTK-KDE Gitlab & extract it your ~/Downloads folder. Now open a terminal from within the extracted folder & run:

sudo cp clamtk-kde.desktop /usr/share/kservices5/ServiceMenus/

Theming & Customisations

Install Oh My Zsh

Oh My Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration.

sh -c "$(wget https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh -O -)"

My favourite theme is Powerlevel10k (follow below for installation).

  • You can visit here to download theme of your choice.

Get Powerlevel10k Theme for Oh My Zsh

This is the theme I'll install to spice up my terminal experience.

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/themes/powerlevel10k

Get the recommended fonts

We will be using Yay to install the below two packages as one of them is only available from AUR.

yay -S ttf-dejavu ttf-meslo-nerd-font-powerlevel10k

Also set your Konsole Terminal font to MesloGS-NF-Regular.

Set Powerlevel10k as your Zsh Theme

nano ~/.zshrc

Find the line starting with ZSH_THEME="...." and replace the theme name so the line should now look like this ZSH_THEME="powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k" Now do source ~/.zshrc.

Configuration

For new users, on the first run, Powerlevel10k configuration wizard will ask you a few questions and configure your prompt. If it doesn't trigger automatically, type p10k configure. Configuration wizard creates ~/.p10k.zsh based on your preferences. Additional prompt customization can be done by editing this file. It has plenty of comments to help you navigate through configuration options.

Kvantum Manager

Kvantum is a SVG-based theme engine for Qt, tuned to KDE and LXQt, with an emphasis on elegance, usability and practicality.

Install through Yay (git version)

yay -S kvantum-qt5-git

Or

Install through Pacman

sudo pacman -S kvantum

Maintenance, Performance Tuning & Monitoring

Paccache

Pacman Cache Cleaner.

Install

sudo pacman -S pacman-contrib

To manually clean pacman cache, run

sudo paccache -rk

Where, k indicates to keep "num" of each package in the cache.

To automate paccache process

Create a file in /etc/pacman.d/hooks

sudo mkdir /etc/pacman.d/hooks
sudo nano /etc/pacman.d/hooks/clean_cache.hook

Add the following lines in it

[Trigger]
Operation = Upgrade
Operation = Install
Operation = Remove
Type = Package
Target = *
[Action]
Description = Cleaning pacman cache...
When = PostTransaction
Exec = /usr/bin/paccache -rk

save & exit.

Install Cockpit

A systemd web based user interface for Linux servers, Workstations and even Desktops. Can be used to monitor your system stats, performance and perform various settings including updating of your system.

sudo pacman -S cockpit
Enable Cockpit
sudo systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket

Now open your browser and point to it your-machine-ip:9000 and login with root to get full access.


Changelog

  • 2024-06-25
    • A lot of changes, improvements, and updates. Special thanks to our biggest contributor @Exvix.

Full and complete changelog, click here.

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