First download arch iso and make sure to have a spare pendrive to format as a bootable one. If you like distro hopping a lot Ventoy may be a good option instead of using other ways to put just the arch iso in the pendrive. Even more if you have a larger pendrive than the at most 4gb needed for any linux distro.
After changing the boot order to the pendrive first and booting into it choose Arch Linux Install Medium to start.
Now check your internet with ping gnu.org. If you have wifi read the man.
Set your time right with timedatectl set-ntp true.
lsblk to check which device you'll install arch.
cfdisk /dev/nvme0n1 (replace nvme0n1 to whatever your case) to open the disk partitioning tool.
create a boot partition, I like to have spare space if I want to custom it a little so I go with 512M, but 128M is more than enought for grub.
Set the boot partition as type > BIOS boot, create another partition with all the rest of the space, the type will be Linux Filesystem, this will be the partition for your system.
Write, yes, quit.
mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/nvme0n1p1 for the first partition (the boot one)
mkfs.btrfs /dev/nvme0n1p2 for the system one.
I use timeshift so I wont create any btrfs subvolume since this will be managed by timeshift.
Mount the main system mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt
Create the boot folder mkdir /mnt/boot
And the efi folder mkdir /mnt/boot/efi
Mount the boot partition mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot for efi change the last to /mnt/boot/efi
lsblk to check if you mounted right.
pacstrap /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware vim intel-ucode btrfs-progs
Those are the basic packages that you'll need for your system. If you are on amd change intel for amd-ucode
Generate your fstab that will contain your drivers genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
Enter your system to install some other necessary things arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
Install the packages pacman -S networkmanager grub grub-btrfs efibootmgr os-prober
networkmanager to have internet access grub as your bootloader grub-btrfs for show your snapshots on grub efibootmgr needed to do a propper grub-install os-prober needed if you'll use VM's later
Enable the network systemctl enable NetworkManager
Configure grub on your entire drive grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB
Generate your configuration file grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
If the response don't show "found linux image..." and "found initrd image..." you need to re-run the pacstrap command.
To do so, exit the current environment and run the pacstrap command again, then arch-chroot again.
create a password for your root user with passwd
Select the language you want with vim /etc/locale.gen and uncommenting the language you want (e.g en_US UTF-8 and en_US ISO)
Generate the locale locale-gen
Create the config of your locale vim /etc/locale.conf and write LANG=en-US.UTF-8 or whatever language that you want.
Create your hostname with vim /etc/hostname and typing the name that you want. It's what appears on bash when you're writting after the @ so user@hostname
Set your timezone with ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/ then tab to your region and city so for example if you're in UK you can do /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London then /etc/localtime
The complete command is ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime
exit and umount -R /mnt to leave the root shell and remove the mounting points
reboot and good luck.
If for some reason after rebooting Arch doesn't show on grub, return to your arch-chroot environment
Then reinstall linux and grub with pacman, rerun the grub-install command, reconfigure grub, run mkinitcpio -P, recofigure grub again.
useradd -mg wheel username
this creates a user with username, his home directory and adds it to the group wheel.
the -g is to add to groups and -m to create its home directory.
create the user password with passwd username
give your user sudo access:
vim /etc/sudoers do /wheel to find the wheel config on the file.
Uncomment the line saying "%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL" or something simmilar.
log into your user by typing exit and enter your username and password.
sudo vim /etc/pacman.conf
Under # Misc options uncomment
Color to add colors,
VerbosePkgLists to add more info when updating package,
ParallelDownloads = 5 (or more, you set the number), to download packages in paralel,
CheckSpace, if you don't have much space and want to check if you have enough before installing a pkg,
add ILoveCandy to have pacman as your progress bar.
Under # REPOSITORIES uncomment
[multilib] and the Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist right below it.
Arch installation guide nishantnadkarni arch install with btrfs