Holy hell! The first time I installed Arch for my laptop it took me like 40 minutes, but I forgot to install a DE and had to go back to the live USB mount every, chroot in, and install Gnome. All in all it took about an hour. This time it took me literally the entire night and part of the afternoon too!
I installed grub and ran the command to install it on the EFI, but I forgot to make the config file. So I spent hours trying to figure out why the hell it wouldn’t boot into Arch. I ended up completely reinstalling Arch 3 times in case I had borked the install since I have another EFI partition, another OS on this drive, and 7 partitions total. When I finally figured out that I skipped the config file I wasn’t even mad. I was so freaking relieved to figure out what I had done wrong that I was happy.
Then I installed Plasma, but it needs a bunch of other packages that either aren’t in the man page, or I missed them since I was pretty tired by that point. Got that all installed finally and set up, restarted, and realized that I can’t even log into KDE with a root account! Haha. I had to go back to the live CD and install sudo, and set up the sudoers file.
Holy shit man, that was the hardest time I’ve had with an install in over a decade. I’ve been doing this a long time and it usually goes pretty smoothly, but I guess my brain was in my pocket or something today. But it’s done!
KDE Plasma seems pretty slick. I still need to install my Nvidia drivers, steam, and all that jazz, but it’s way past bedtime now. I’ll do it after work tomorrow.
Oh, I installed yay too and wow, what a time saver! On my laptop I’ve been manually making packages for stuff like Firefox and whatever the whole time I’ve used it. I don’t have a lot of software on that laptop since it’s old and mainly just an Internet portal, but I’m definitely going to be using yay for that from now on.
If you’re still reading, I’m so exited to have finally made the switch and have it done. None of my friends are into this kind of stuff and my wife has no idea about any of it, so I just had to tell someone, and you seemed kind of invested earlier. Thanks for listening! Lol.