I’ve been using Linux for a long time, and I’ve used EndeavourOS before, as part of my chronic distro hopping, which I’m trying to cure. I was always a Debian user until Antergos brought me into the world of Arch. Lately, I’ve been switching between Fedora and Debian, trying to find stability, but I miss the agility of Arch, and I’ve decided that this should be the system for my new computer. When I found this thread, I jumped at the chance to ask about it, with the idea that the installation I want to do on my system will last a long time, now that the death of my Thinkpad T420 has forced me to get a new computer.
The installation will be encrypted in Btrfs with subvolumes.
The idea is to expand the memory to 32GiB and add a second 2048GiB disk (or replace the current one if this is not possible).
Installing it isn’t a big problem for me, but there are a few things I’m not sure about:
For Btrfs snapshots, subvolumes are the most suitable, and Timeshift or Snapper are the best options. I also need some guidance on how to configure them.
I need to understand the issue of tim on nvme disks, although I don’t think it’s necessary with Btrfs.
I want to do the swap in zram, although I don’t know if, given that I have to have a virtualized Windows, it would be better to have a partition. If I do the partition, what would be the appropriate size, considering 32GiB of RAM?
I intend to use it with Gnome, the desktop I’m used to, since I want to use Wayland, but I want to start working on switching to Sway. Should I install it from the beginning or do it step by step afterwards to understand it better (my preferred option), and is there a default Sway configuration in any repo?
I don’t think using Flatpaks in Arch is critical, but since I use some KDE packages, and packages like Calibre, Steam, Telegram or Zoom, I think it’s safer to install them in a somewhat encapsulated way. Would you recommend using them? In my opinion, AUR is ideal for drivers and things like that, but for packages such as those mentioned, I’m not sure if Flatpak is better. However, I don’t have any technical expertise, so I would like to hear the opinions of those of you who know the system inside out.
My idea is to have a stable desktop that is easy to recover in case of failure, allowing me to virtualize if I want to try something out. What I use most is Emacs and Firefox, mainly for my notes, although I’m starting to think about making some videos. Any suggestions you think are appropriate will help me define it better.
Thank you in advance, especially to @thefrog for encouraging me to write this.
If you do an automatic install and select btrfs as the filesystem, it will automatically create the subvolumes you need for snapper and timeshift. That being said, you should only use one of those.
Unless are you are trying to support suspend to disk, you probably don’t need much swap. If you are going to use zram, I probably wouldn’t add any swap since you have 32GiB of RAM.
Just install gnome and add sway afterwards.
We have a profile and instructions for how to install it in our community repo.
You can use them if you want to. There are pros and cons. Personally, I would install everything from the AUR unless you have a compelling reason not to. I would be wary of unofficial flatpaks. I also see no good reason to install calibre as a flatpak.
Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation, @dalto. I’m glad to see that I already follow about 90% of the same practices, except for the two points you highlighted.
I’ve been reusing the /home partition across different distros, but I make sure to delete all hidden files and folders beforehand, keeping only my personal data directories.
As for the swap partition, I stopped using one a few years ago on machines with 32GB of RAM. I don’t use sleep or hibernate, as I prefer to fully shut down the system when it’s not in use. That said, if having swap is still considered beneficial, I might revisit the idea — possibly using zram or a swap file instead.
Regarding flatpak, I personally think it’s only useful if the software isn’t in the distro’s repositories, or at least can’t be installed (perhaps without going crazy). In that case, it’s handy.
But for more “common” apps like Steam or Calibre, it’s better to install them via repositories than via flatpak. For example, from what I’ve seen, Steam’s flatpak version doesn’t restore backups, while Steam installed from the repos does.
I’ll use Steam as an example, because I had to install it via flatpak on ParrotOS, where there’s no option to install it from the repos or the .deb package (it’s missing some necessary dependencies anyway). The flatpak version might also cause input issues with controllers, if I remember correctly. Other apps, such as the Brave browser, aren’t as fully functional in the flatpak version as the version installable from the repos.
In short, as I see it, flatpak is useful for those applications that you can’t find in the repos, otherwise the version from the repositories is better.
I’m delighted with how it’s working, and I’ve even left a nice fastfetch.