My Experience with Installing Arch Linux

This post will wrap up my experience with installing Arch Linux on a gaming pc of a friend of mine.

Starting Situation

About the Situation itself

He did plan to do this for a long time. The main reason for his decision was that his old hardware is not supported with Windows 11 anymore, prevent him from updating.

Since he is a father of two children time for important stuff like this is limited, so he pushed the task back for a long time. But as I had some vacciation from work he asked me if I want to help him out installing. I was super interessted to help him so we meet the day after. We also did take care of one of his and mine child, so while working on this project they helped us out or manipulated our progress.

About Us

Both of us are software engineers and we love thinkering. We also got some knowledge with Linux on our daily work.

He does use a Linux Mint Notebook for a while now and it worked great.

I used a Linux Mint Notebook as well, updated it to Arch at the start of the year. Previously there was Mint installed and I used it as a dual boot with Windows 10. I never used the Windows installation, so fully comitting to Linux for that piece of hardware was just a matter of time.

The Goal

We had a simple plan for the day:

  1. First of all install his old PC and backup everything he needs on a sperate disk.
  2. Install some new hardware he got gifted, namely a new board, cpu and ram. Everything was already installed on the main board as a single package.
  3. Install a new power supply which uses managed cables.
  4. Install Arch Linux with KDE and SDDM on the new machine.
  5. Install the proprietary NVIDIA driver on the pc and get it running.
  6. Test if a game does start up.

The Hardware Upgrade

First of all we opend up his computer case and removed his old hardware. This was stressful because some parts weren't as easy to uninstall as we thought. The main issue here was that some fans blocked the main board so we could no lift it without removing the them. While doing this the childrens slowly got bored and started to do children stuff. After half an hour we did successfully remove the old hardware and started to install the new one. Since all the fans where already removed this was a fast process.

We decided to not install the power supply since some cables where already repaired via isulation tape and that felt not right. Since the new power supply unit only provided ~10 0W more power and we did reuse his old graphic card, we where pretty sure that there should be enough power available for the system. After installing all the components we plugged it in and checked for a successful boot to the BIOS. We disconnected all the ssd's where backup data was stored only keeping the os disk plugged in.

Now it was time to plug in the installation medium containig Arch and boot the system.

The Installation Script

After selecting the boot stick, we got greeted by the Arch installer. Since we are both some Linux newbies we decided to use the installation script and keep it simple. So we openend up the installation guide, started the script and filled out all the required information.

As we reached the part of the installation where we need to partition the disk we decided to increase the root partition. This happed because as I installed my Arch notebook I did use the default settings. For me the default root partition on my notebook was to small and I did run into issues. Ineeded to fix this via gdparted and a small boot stick. To prevent this issue for his machine we did want to do it right.

So we deleted the root and home partition via the manual editing tool and tried to create the on our own. We took a long time understanding how exactly to use this tool and it always felt kinda wrong. We continued with the partition process, we simple wanted a /root with ~80 Gb and use the rest as /home. We configured the rest on the installation skript.

After we finished that we pressed the install button and got an error message that something with our partition went wrong. Since it was time for lunch at this point we did take a short break.

As we got back to the problem, we just started the archinstall script again and noticed that the SSD was not detected anymore. To solve this we restartet the machine. After restart we could access the disc again and tried another attemp for a correct partition table, but it failed again. We repeated that exact same issues once more, on the fourth installation attempt we were frustrated. Because we were still lookin after the childrens and it was already after lunch, we decided to use a single partition because this shouldn't be an issue. Only downside with this is you can't reinstall the boot system without wiping home I guess.

With this approach we could use the recommended settings for the partition process, hoping that the installation will work out this time. So we pressed the install button and got beyond the point of the previous crashes.

Everything else went smoothly after that, as the installation finished we switched into the new installed system and added some additional tools before finally rebooting into the new desktop enviroment.

Setup for the NVIDIA Proprietary Driver

After the reboot we where granted with the SDDM login manager, since no theme was set just yet it looked a litte bit off. As the resolution of the monitor was detected correctly already it seemed like the driver also did hos job. The thing which looked strange to me was that both monitors showed the same image, so instead of using the second monitor as a extension he used it for mirroring.

After the successful login the resolution changed to a wrong one, we checked the display settings and noticed that nothing was correctly detected. Our first guess was that something is wrong with the NVIDIA driver.

So we did start to search the internet what must be changed. We learned that for KDE with Wayland we need to aktivate the “drm” mode by adding nvidia-drm.modeset=1 to a configuration file. We did search for an hour where to add this and how we should solve this, slowly getting the information required to do this. We learned that this is a Kernel setting and we need to tell the system to use the NVIDIA driver instead of the open source one. Non of the articles/forum entries found on the internet really told us how to do this. We tried multiple things and rebootet the system at least ten times.

As we were really frustrated we found a single GitHub Page with an guide on how to install the driver (But this information is depricated I guess), enable DRM and make sure to load the driver on system start. We followed the guide and rebooted the system, logged in and the resolution was automatically correctly set. Whoever wrote this GitHub readme, thank you so much, you properly saved the installation. We checked the display settings and everything seemed to be working as expected, we finally did found a solution.

After verifing the driver we installed Lutris, Steam and Bottles. We did a quick test by installing the Epic Game launcher on Lutris to verify that all packages are installed and ready. After a successful login we installed Steam, selected the correct Vulkan driver and enabled Proton. Since the Toddlers where really bored already we decided to do not test any further software. It was already after 3:30 PM.

Lesson Learned

I think I did learn a lot about Arch and Linux with this installation. I learned how to install proprietary drivers and tell the system to use them. I learned thinks about the inner working of Linux by editing files related to the graphic driver. I did learn that installing software which is mainly for windows isn't a real issue anymore with the help of tools like Lutris and Bottles. At the end those are just som abstraction layers on top of Wine but they really make a difference.

I think it is possible for every gamer, who already installed an OS on there own or is willing to lern, can install a Linux distro and start gaming on it. You may should not start with Arch itself but using something like EndeavourOS, which is a Arch based distro. As an alternative I think Mint is always a good start and does run out of the box. I do not know if Mint does support proprietary NVIDIA drivers but I think it's highly likeable.