Installed software

• Window Manager • Hyprland
• Shell • Oh My Zsh w/ Starship Prompt
• Terminal • kitty
• Panel • Waybar (Patched waybar following Hyprland FAQ)
• Notification Daemon • Dunst
• Launcher • wofi
• File Manager • Ranger
• IDE • NvChad-V2

Themes

• GTK • GTK
• Icon • Icon theme
• Cursor • Cursor theme

Oh-My-Zsh Extensions

• zsh-syntax-highlighting
• zsh-autosuggestions
• zsh-nvm

Screenshots

Setup

Install yay

sudo pacman -S base-devel

mkdir $HOME/git
cd $HOME/git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay
makepkg -si

Install needed dependencies

yay -S hyprland-git dunst hyprpaper-git waybar-hyprland-git \
qt5-wayland qt6-wayland 

Extras

# themes
yay -S catppuccin-gtk-theme-mocha nwg-look 

# apps
yay -S cava ranger zsh starship neovim

# graphical file manager (optional)
yay -S thunar thunar archive-plugin file-roller

Clone this repo

You will need to have generated an SSH key and added it to your github (or alternatively, use the read-only URL of https://github.com/lachie-underhill/dotfiles).

git clone [email protected]:lachie-underhill/dotfiles.git $HOME/dotfiles
cd $HOME/dotfiles

Using Stow

GNU Stow (or just stow) is a symbolink link manager and is used to manage all of my dotfiles.

You'll notice that all of the config is stored in folders pertaining to the software that the config is for. For example, all the config required for dunst is in a folder named dunst.

You can then use stow to create symlinks in the required config location for those apps to pick them up.

stow hyprland nvim waybar

Note: You will need to delete the existing files/directories if they already exist

If you're interested in learning more about how this method works, I'd highly recommend checking out this article by Alex Pearce.

Credits

/r/unixporn for endless inspo

---

Detailed Breakdown of my Arch Install

Disclaimer

If you're not me, you probably don't need to be reading this. I mainly just wanted to have this process documented so I don't have to keep rediscovering solutions to problems I've already solved.

If you aren't me and you're just curious, keep reading! Don't expect this to make much sense or even be up to date though. You can think of this as a highly opinionated version of the Arch Installation Guide.

Pre-Requisites

1. Have an Arch ISO on a USB (w/ Ventoy or RUFUS)
2. Boot into said USB
3. Connect to the internet (iwctl docs for Wi-Fi)

Disk Partitioning

It is assumed you already have an empty drive, or a drive with unallocated space to be used for this installation.

All instructions will be assuming an install on /dev/sda. Modify where required if using a different disk.

Using whatever paritioning tool you like (fdisk, gdisk etc.), you will need two partitions:

1. EFI partition on the boot drive (will already exist if dual-booting with Windows)
   • Will most likely be /dev/sda1
   • 100MB is fine, but if it's feasible, create with 512MB
   • Fat32 format (mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sda1)
2. Root partition
   • EXT4 format (mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2)

You can create an additional Home Partition (ext4) to use for your /home directory if you like. I'm sure there's a good reason to do this, but I haven't ever felt the need.

Optimise mirrorlist

Pacman uses something called the mirrorlist, which defines where to pull packages from when downloading. The default mirrorlist will most likely be quite slow, sometimes to the point of downloads timing out. We can use a tool called reflector to optimise this mirrorlist to ensure fast downloads.

pacman -Syy
pacman -S reflector
cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.bak

reflector -c "Australia" -l 10 --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Install Arch Linux

Now on to the fun part - actually installing Arch.

Mount partitions

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi

# optional - if using Home Partition
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/home

Pacstrap

Add whatever packages you want to add to your actual Arch installation.

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware linux-headers vim git networkmanager

Generate fstab

We've manually mounted our partitions, but when we reboot these mounts will disappear. Using genfstab, we can tell the system to mount these partitions every time.

genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Arch chroot

For the rest of this installation, we'll chroot into our actual install.

arch-chroot /mnt

Set Timezone

# Set timezone
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Brisbane /etc/localtime

# Generate /etc/adjtime
hwclock --systohc

Localisation

Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment your locale (eg. en_AU.UTF-8), then generate locales.

locale-gen
echo LANG=en_AU.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
export LANG=en_AU.UTF-8

Network Configuration

echo myhostname > /etc/hostname
touch /etc/hosts

Edit /etc/hosts file to include the following (replace myhostname with the hostname you chose earlier).

127.0.0.1 localhost
::1		  localhost
127.0.0.1 myhostname

systemctl enable NetworkManager.service

User Config

# Set root password
passwd

# Add sudo group
pacman -S sudo
groupadd sudo

# Create user
useradd -m username
passwd username

# Add user to groups
usermod -aG wheel,sudo username

Modify visudo file using visudo command and uncomment/add the following lines:

%wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Install Bootloader

It's recommended to install grub now, even if you want to use REFInd later. REFInd really doesn't like being installed when using the live disk, because the refind-install script isn't that smart (or I'm not smart enough to use it properly).

If you missed the step before, make sure the EFI partition is mounted at /boot/efi.

pacman -S grub efibootmgr
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --bootloader-id=GRUB --efi-directory=/boot/efi
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Reboot

# Exit chroot environment
exit

# Unmount all partitions
umount -R /mnt

reboot

Remove your installation media, and make sure you boot into your new install.

It's recommended to verify you can boot into both Arch and Windows at this point.

Install yay

See above

NVIDIA (optional)

You obviously only need to do this if you have an NVIDIA GPU.

# Use nvidia-open-dkms if using supported GPU:
# https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules#compatible-gpus
pacman -S nvidia-dkms

In /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, add nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm to your MODULES

mkinitcpio --config /etc/mkinitcpio.conf --generate /boot/initramfs-custom.img
echo options nvidia-drm modeset=1 > /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf

Create pacman hook

To avoid the possibility of forgetting to update initramfs after an NVIDIA driver upgrade, add the following to /etc/pacman.d/hooks/nvidia.hook:

[Trigger]
Operation=Install
Operation=Upgrade
Operation=Remove
Type=Package
Target=nvidia-dkms # or nvidia-open-dkms if installed above
Target=linux

[Action]
Description=Update NVIDIA module in initcpio
Depends=mkinitcpio
When=PostTransaction
NeedsTargets
Exec=/bin/sh -c 'while read -r trg; do case $trg in linux) exit 0; esac; done; /usr/bin/mkinitcpio -P'