Thought I would make a topic to document my adventures in trying to get Arch Linux to do what I want it to do. Specifically, running on my computer. I did have it successfully working but due to an issue with a package I installed, somehow the whole thing went belly up with me forgetting to make a snapshot to restore to.
So, I installed it yet again. I started out in KDE Plasma and installed Firefox and my NVIDIA drivers so that I could have some hardware acceleration.
I forgot to install all of the applications I needed. So I installed a terminal program (yakuake -- it drops down from the top of the screen when you press F12, very spiffy) and went to work with installing the other crud.
sudo pacman -Syu plasma firefox nvidia yakquake alacritty neovim xorg wayland plasma-wayland-session kde-applications kde-applications-meta sddm discord weechat tmux steam
Install
yay (tool for managing packages in the AUR):
sudo pacman -S --needed git base-devel && git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-bin.git && cd yay-bin && makepkg -siY
List of packages installed using yay:
Configuring Alacritty
Alacritty is a GPU accelerated terminal emulator that I rather enjoy using. Although Kitty is good too, might even be better. I've adjusted to using Alacritty so that is what I'm sticking with.
mkdir ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml
nvim ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml
The only thing I've really done to change the behavior of Alacritty is adjust the font. Full guide for the config file is over
here.
Install Oh-My-Fish
Designed to make your terminal look better with a collection of different themes. I use Fish as my shell because it has a great set of features to make things a bit more modern. I used Oh-My-Posh for a while, but I prefer the simplicity of Oh-My-Fish.
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish/master/bin/install | fish
Configuring NeoVim / LazyVim
LazyVim will transform your NeoVim into an code editor comparable to something like VS Code but all entirely inside of a terminal.
git clone https://github.com/LazyVim/starter ~/.config/nvim
rm -rf ~/.config/nvim/.git
Things specific to my machine that I installed (proprietary drivers etc for ASUS ROG Laptops)
There's a great community built around laptops similar to mine, and the tools created were intended to be used with Arch-based distros. So I followed the instructions
here to install the needed / necessary packages so my computer would work normally (mostly).
Added nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to the end of /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf. I also added the following options to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf:
MODULES=(nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm)
At this point, I feel that I have my computer set up to do most of the things I need to do. I'll probably add on to this topic as I configure stuff.
