Arch Linux Guide

Installation

When it comes to a comprehensive installation guide, nothing beats the official installation guide. However, because it’s so comprehensive, it often presents only general guidelines, rather than specific recommendations beginners are usually looking for. This guide goes over some specific things I learned during my several installations and their advantages/disadvantages.

Partitioning

My current partition layout on a 256 GB SSD is as follows:

+-----------------------+ +-------------------------------+---------------+
| EFI System Partition  | | Logical volume 1              | Empty space   |
| /dev/nvme0n1p1        | | /dev/vg1/root                 | for snapshots |
|                       | |                               |               |
| Size: 512 MiB         | | Size: 230 GiB                 | Size: ~8 GiB  |
| Type: EFI System      | | Mounted on: /                 |               |
| Mounted on: /boot     | |                               |               |
|                       | |                               |               |
|                       | |                               |               |
|                       | +-------------------------------+---------------+
|                       | |                                               |
|                       | | LUKS2 encrypted partition                     |
|                       | | /dev/nvme0n1p2                                |
|                       | |                                               |
|                       | | Size: 100% remaining                          |
|                       | | Type: Linux filesystem                        |
|                       | | PV: /dev/mapper/cryptlvm                      |
|                       | |                                               |
+-----------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------+

I’ve forgone the usual swap partition because my laptop has 32 GiB of RAM, which has been more than enough to handle my daily usage. I don’t need hibernation either, so this works fine for me. However, after reading this article, I realized that reserving around 4 GiB of swap space (in exchange for some of the snapshot space, which I never fully utilize anyways), could result in cache performance benefits and provide some leeway before processes get shut down, should I ever run out of memory for any reason. When I upgrade my laptop and get a bigger SSD, I will definitely add some swap.

Encryption

As you can see from the diagram under “Partitioning,” I have something called a “LUKS2 encrypted partition.” I highly recommend encrypting your hard drive and setting up LVM on top of it. This method is known as LVM on LUKS, and it’s probably the most sensible approach for a personal laptop with a single drive. You’ll unlock your drive once on boot, and after that you’ll have normal access to your entire drive.