If you’ve spent any time in Linux forums or on YouTube, you’ve seen the Arch install videos. Someone breezes through a terminal, types a few commands, and twenty minutes later they’re running a beautiful desktop. It looks effortless.
It is not effortless.
I recently switched my main desktop from Windows to Arch Linux, and I wanted to write about what that process actually looked like — the parts that worked, the parts that didn’t, and the things I wish someone had told me before I started. This is the first in a series. I’ll link out to deep-dive articles on specific pieces (partitioning, NVIDIA drivers, gaming setup, and more) as I write them, so consider this the map and those the terrain.
Why Arch, and Why Not Something Easier
Before touching a single command, I looked at Pop!_OS, Mint, and a few other beginner-friendly distros. They’re genuinely good, and if you want a “just works” Linux experience, they’re the better choice for most people. Pop!_OS in particular has NVIDIA support baked in out of the box, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes Arch harder by comparison.
I went with Arch anyway, for a specific reason: I wanted to actually understand my system, not just use it. Arch doesn’t make decisions for you. It doesn’t install a desktop environment, a display manager, or much of anything by default — you build the system piece by piece. That’s a downside if you want convenience. It’s the entire point if you want control and a lean, low-bloat setup with nothing running that you didn’t choose to install.
There’s also a practical side to this that doesn’t get talked about enough: when something breaks on Arch, you generally know what’s on your system well enough to have a fighting chance at fixing it. When something breaks on a distro that made a hundred decisions for you behind the scenes, you’re often debugging a black box. That trade-off — more upfront effort for more long-term legibility — is really the whole pitch for Arch.
If that sounds tedious rather than appealing, that’s a completely reasonable reaction, and it’s worth being honest with yourself about which camp you’re in before you commit a weekend to this. There is no wrong answer here. Plenty of extremely competent Linux users run Mint forever and never look back.
The Hardware I Was Working With
My desktop isn’t new. It’s about six years old at this point:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (6 cores / 12 threads)
- NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti
- 16GB DDR4 RAM
- ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F Gaming motherboard
For storage, I split things across three drives: a Samsung 980 PRO 2TB NVMe, a 240GB SATA SSD, and a 2TB HDD for bulk storage. That layout mattered a lot for how I approached the install, which I’ll get to.
I mention the specs because “does Arch run well on older hardware” is a real question people have, and the honest answer is: yes, but the NVIDIA GPU is exactly where most of your headaches will live. AMD and Intel graphics tend to “just work” on Linux because their drivers are open source and mainlined into the kernel. NVIDIA is the odd one out — their proprietary driver is a separate install, a separate update cadence, and historically the single biggest source of Linux desktop pain. If your hardware is all-AMD or all-Intel, a lot of what I describe below simply won’t apply to you, and your install will be noticeably smoother.
The Plan: Dual Boot, Not a Clean Break
I wasn’t ready to fully abandon Windows. I still needed it for a handful of things, so I set up a dual-boot configuration instead of wiping the drive:
- Arch Linux (KDE Plasma, Btrfs filesystem) on the Samsung 980 PRO NVMe
- Windows 11 Home on the 240GB SATA SSD
Having them on physically separate drives made this dramatically less stressful than partitioning a single drive would have been. If you’re on the fence about dual booting, putting Windows and Linux on separate physical drives is the single best decision I made in this whole process — it removes a huge category of “what if I destroy my Windows partition” anxiety. There’s no shared partition table to corrupt, no resizing an NTFS partition and hoping nothing goes wrong, and no shared bootloader entry that could accidentally point at the wrong drive.
Getting the boot side of this working meant configuring Secure Boot and systemd-boot correctly so the system could reliably choose between the two operating systems at startup. In practice this meant confirming UEFI boot mode was active, creating a dedicated EFI system partition, and registering both operating systems as boot entries. A simplified version of setting up systemd-boot looks something like this:
# Mount the EFI system partition, then install systemd-boot to it
bootctl --path=/boot install
# Create a boot entry for Arch
cat > /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf << EOF
title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options root=/dev/nvme0n1p2 rw
EOFWindows registers its own entry automatically as long as it was already installed before Arch, which is part of why I set up Windows first and Arch second — doing it in the other order tends to cause Windows to quietly overwrite the bootloader. This whole area — partitioning, EFI entries, Secure Boot keys — is dense enough that it deserves its own dedicated article, because it’s also the area where a small mistake can leave you unable to boot into anything.
The Install Itself
I chose KDE Plasma as my desktop environment and Btrfs as my filesystem. KDE because it’s polished and configurable without feeling like a science project, and Btrfs mainly for the snapshot capabilities — the idea that I can roll back a bad update is appealing when you’re still new to a system and more likely to break something than someone who’s been running Linux for a decade.
The Arch install process itself lives up to its reputation: everything is manual. Partitioning, mounting, base package selection, bootloader configuration, network setup — all of it is done by hand, following the Arch wiki (which is genuinely excellent, if dense). There’s no graphical installer holding your hand. A rough sketch of the base install commands looks like this:
# Partition and format the target drive (example only — be careful with device names)
mkfs.btrfs /dev/nvme0n1p2
mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt
# Install the base system
pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware
# Generate the filesystem table
genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
# Chroot in to configure the new system
arch-chroot /mntFrom inside that chroot, you’re setting the timezone, generating locales, setting a hostname, creating your user account, and installing a bootloader — each one its own small decision point rather than a single “next, next, finish” wizard. That’s exactly what I wanted, but it’s also where the “twenty-minute install video” myth falls apart. Reading the wiki carefully the first time through, understanding what each step actually does, and fixing the inevitable typo in a config file took considerably longer than any tutorial implies. I’d budget an entire evening for your first attempt, not a lunch break.
Once the base system was in place, getting to an actual graphical desktop meant installing KDE Plasma and a display manager on top:
pacman -S plasma-desktop sddm
systemctl enable sddmThe first time that login screen actually appeared, after however many hours of terminal work, was a genuinely satisfying moment — more so than clicking through any Windows setup wizard has ever felt.
Getting the GPU and Gaming Working
This was the part I was most nervous about, since gaming was a real requirement for me, not a nice-to-have.
I installed the NVIDIA proprietary driver along with lib32-nvidia-utils for 32-bit compatibility and Vulkan support:
pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils lib32-nvidia-utils vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loaderThe 32-bit packages matter more than they might seem — a lot of games and Proton’s compatibility layer still rely on 32-bit libraries under the hood, and skipping them is a common reason people get a black screen or silent crashes when launching a game for the first time.
Once that was in place, I got Counter-Strike 2 running through Steam and Proton — including working audio through my headset and correct shader/Vulkan configuration, which is often the part that trips people up on NVIDIA hardware specifically. Verifying the driver actually loaded correctly was its own small ritual:
nvidia-smi
glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"If either of those comes back empty or shows the wrong device, that’s usually the first sign something in the driver stack isn’t hooked up right — worth checking before you even open Steam.
If you’re coming from Windows and gaming is part of why you’re hesitant to switch, this is the reassurance I’d give you: it works, and it can work well. It’s just not automatic the way it is on Windows. Each piece — driver, 32-bit libraries, Proton compatibility, audio routing — is something you configure rather than something that’s configured for you. The upside is that once it’s configured, it tends to stay working; there’s no equivalent of a surprise Windows update quietly breaking your audio drivers overnight.
Package Management: pacman and the AUR
One of the philosophical shifts coming from Windows is just how central the package manager becomes. I use pacman for official Arch packages:
pacman -Syu # update the whole system
pacman -S <package> # install a package
pacman -Ss <term> # search for a packageFor anything not in the official repos, I lean on paru as my AUR helper for the wider community package repository, which works almost identically from the command line:
paru -S <package> # install from AUR (or official repos)
paru -Ss <term> # search both official repos and AURI generally prefer native Arch packages over Flatpak or other sandboxed formats unless there’s a real, specific benefit to the sandboxing — I’d rather keep things lean than add a layer I don’t need, and one more runtime to keep updated.
This is a bigger mental shift than it sounds like on paper. On Windows, “installing software” mostly means downloading an .exe from a website and hoping it’s not malware. On Arch, it becomes “is this in the official repos, is it in the AUR, or do I need to build it myself” — and getting comfortable with that decision tree, plus the general habit of checking a package’s build script before installing anything from the AUR, is part of the learning curve. The AUR is community-maintained, not officially vetted by Arch, so a little healthy skepticism about what you’re installing goes a long way.
The Rough Edges (Because There Always Are Some)
In the spirit of not presenting this as effortless: a few things didn’t just work.
I ran into some cosmetic quirks with Dolphin (KDE’s file manager) and the Breeze Dark theme — nothing that broke functionality, just some appearance inconsistencies that were more annoying than serious. Icons not matching the dark theme consistently, some dialogs rendering in a lighter theme than the rest of the desktop — small, unglamorous friction that doesn’t show up in any tutorial because it’s not interesting enough to make a video about, but it’s exactly the kind of thing you bump into during your first week.
None of this is a “don’t switch to Arch” red flag. It’s the kind of small friction that every real migration involves, and that the polished tutorials tend to skip because “and then I fixed a theming inconsistency” doesn’t make for good footage.
Was It Worth It?
So far, yes. I have a system that boots fast, runs lean, and doesn’t have anything installed that I didn’t put there myself. I understand my own machine better than I ever did running Windows, and when something breaks, I actually know why — which is a strange kind of confidence to gain from a system that, on paper, is more “high maintenance” than what I came from.
If you’re considering the switch, my honest advice is: do it if you want to learn, not if you just want convenience. Pop!_OS and Mint exist for a reason, and there’s no shame in choosing the smoother path. But if you want to actually understand what your computer is doing, Arch will teach you — sometimes gently, sometimes by making you read a wiki page three times before it clicks.
This is the first article in a series on my Linux migration. Coming up: a deep dive into dual-boot partitioning and bootloader setup, getting NVIDIA and gaming fully configured, and how Btrfs snapshots actually work in practice.