Really great video. I much appreciate the content that you add! You one of the most comprehensive channels I have found when it comes to Arch. Always clear, concise, and on point. If you ever have time in the future I would really love to see how you'd set up btrfs with full disk encryption.
Thank you for this excellent video. There were a couple of things I was missing when I was trying to install it by myself, but now everything works just fine. Many thanks!
2:32. I also like enabling the verbosepkglist option, so the packages and dependencies list is easier to read during installation. And I like adding "ILoveCandy" as well because I like cool looking pacman animation 😆.
Another excellent video! I have used Arch for about 5 years now and I always learn something new. Truly appreciate your time and efforts, thanks! P.S. Would love to see that Arch Linux QEMU setup and configuration video if you think it would be worthwhile. Hoping to replace VirtualBox one of these days but the QEMU setup/config always turns me away compared to VB ease of use. :P
Dear Stephen, what a great video! I am using Arch for a bunch of years now. I think my first steps are 10 years ago. But anyway, if you have a running system, you stop reading man-pages and Wikis so much. Now i wanted to try something new (BTRFS) and found your video. But you got me in the first minutes by enabling parallel downloads in pacman. How could i missed such a great thing in all these years 😀. Anyway, thanks for this. I will later try to follow your video and installing Arch on BTRFS (and LUKS i guess, because why not ;-))
Great content. I have built many machines using your tutorials. Would you have any content on how to install Arch using BTRFS with a separate physical home drive? Can’t seem to figure it out.
@@stephenstechtalks5377 thanks, want to use sub volumes for snapshots,etc. was able to do in ZFS on FBSD. I love FBSD but to limiting on software and features. Had to compile Chromium just to get pipe wire to work. Thanks again for your content!
Could you possibly do a tutorial, similar to this one but with encrypted BTRFS fileystem (including /boot)? There are some articles about upgrading key derivation function for LUKS, and I want my system to be as secure as possible.
Steven do you do wm at all? I'm looking at some of the newer ones that are using Wayland! 😂 I haven't found anyplace that explains the key bindings however I'm using my scripted out win 10 no more telemetry 😂 no edge browser! And oh my how much faster
@@stephenstechtalks5377 I would imagine some of the packages might be "budgie" without the gnome meta package then "nemo" as nautilus has issues with theming, "dconfig" for changing nemo to be the default file manager and decent terminal should get you up and running with your current package list
in this configuration, will the system boot into previous snapshots from grub if the kernel is updated? Previously, I had to deal with "problems" with this, I had to add a hook to copy the boot partition to each snapshot created. since in that configuration, the boot partition was moved to a separate partition and is not saved with each snapshot when snapper is launched. And, the philosophical question is - how "safe" is it to keep the cores and partially boot partition on the same partition with the installed system? (in the days of ext2/3/4, everyone was always advised to allocate a separate partition for boot) And thank you so much for the detailed videos, as always everything is clear and reproducible step by step!
Should you run into a bad kernel update, I believe the previous snapshots are also affected since only the root partition is being snapshotted. A workaround that I typically use is install the LTS kernel as a fallback. :)
i am still not clear why you changed your default subvol from 5 to /. i have almost same setup as yours & my @snapshots points to ./snapshot properly. i use snapper-rollback aur as mentioned in wiki. can you point me to some reference that it what would be the consequences if we dont do that and keep 5 as default. PS. Awesome video as always and helpful.
It's really just an old habit for documenting the booting snapshot. :) The snapper-rollback package comes in very handy - unfortunately it requires a different subvolume layout to this video. Thanks for sharing!
At each update Snapper runs grub-mkconfig to add a bootable snapshot to grub similar to what grub-btrfs does, from what I've seen. I've read on the Arch forum that this could cause the grub catastrophe after a grub update since grub-mkconfig was run without grub-install beforehand. So how do you proceed? There seems to be no consensus about what is the correct thing to do in this case...
Thanks for bringing this up! In my opinion, and what I do, is make sure to keep good backups of all important data. Then, should grub break, boot from an Arch-based (or compatible) USB drive, chroot into the existing Arch installation, and manually reinstall grub. This tutorial may be very useful: forum.endeavouros.com/t/the-latest-grub-package-update-needs-some-manual-intervention/30689
@@stephenstechtalks5377 Yeah, I am familiar with the chroot method, although ideally I wouldn't want to do it (that's why I've switched to systemd-boot, which is not a perfect solution as I still prefer grub). Funny enough, I was using grub snapshots during the grub crisis but wasn't affected... Go figure.
man you are a genius, this is minimal and awesome and exactly like i would need it, i would also love it if you didnt use the script? or at least grouped them in a way that we could avoid some unneeded packages? just a suggestion.
Glad you like it! Didn't use the archinstall script in this video - did everything by hand. :) Used simple text package lists because I'm a terrible typist. These need regular updating - packages come and go!
thank you, that worked, im really fascinated by this system that you made, ive been exprimenting the whole day with it but i keep breaking it... i know it is rude of me and perhaps too much to ask from a man that already gave so much to the community, but i have a small wish that would be awesome if you could make a small short tinee tiny video and show us how to roll back from a bootable usb, perhaps how to use AUR snapper-rollback, and how to make exclusions for snapshots, as i am also gaming on this system and it gets very crowded... also it would be nice if you would show how to just roll back 1 certain subvol, lets say i have my own subvol for school and i have all my homeworks in there, and i only want that part to be rolled back and nothing else... thank you kind stephan
Great video! Question: how should mkdir -p /mnt/{/boot/efi,home,.snapshots.,var/{cache.log,lib/libvert/images}} read if not using libvert? just drop lib/libvert keeping ,images? Thanks again foe your hard work.
Hmmm... seems my comment was deleted. But fyi, you dont need to add user to scanner and lp groups. Wont post here the link as could be the reason why its deleted. but under sane arch wiki. under 5.4 permission problem, it states that scanner and lp groups are deprecated.
is there any particular reason why you use btrfs home? it is not snapshotted as i understand? i mean for nomal usage it shouldnt be a problem but linux gaming is growing quite fast, so shouldnt it make more sense to just make a ext4 /home? or at least 1 ext4 partition mainly for steam, wine and similar stuff. just asking tho, i might be missing something, with fio benchmark i get half as good results with btrfs compared to ext4, comparing IOps and BW
Btrfs includes snapshotting capabilities by default. You can have as many subvolumes on a physical disk partition as you want - no need to predict how much space you need in home, for example. They all share the same space as if they were simple subdirectories on an ext4 filesystem... :) Ext4 will always be faster than btrfs in my opinion because it does less. You might try playing around with the options in btrfs and see if you can improve things. The options in my videos generally work very well on the hardware I tested.
@@stephenstechtalks5377 thank you for great advice, its about a week that im watching youtube btrfs isntalls and testing on my LIVE SYSTEM, i still have some issues with grub-btrfs as it does not update grub menu accoridingly, daemon is started and enabled, @snapshots exists and is mounted, also i have run mkconfig grub but still its wrong, its basically always 1 reboot behind. when i remove somehting it takes 2 reboots for it to show in the grub menu... quite of a weird behaviour.
What about those 2 Subvolumes called portables and machines? At 25.40? Where do they come from? Later you delete them with the rm * Is it ok to just delete them?
Here's a good discussion - they get created by systemd, and I don't recall explicitly deleting them in this video: forum.endeavouros.com/t/why-extra-subvolumes-when-installing-with-btrfs/24850 I recommend just ignoring and not deleting them! Thanks for watching!
@@philipmay9614 Yes, the entire contents of the undesired @ subvolume are deleted which is subsequently and wholly recreated from the desired earlier snapshot at 36:30. The Arch wiki has a more in-depth explanation. :)
how would you set up @home for gaming tho? would you keep the compression? or without compression? also should CoW be disabled? how would you improve read speed for a gaming home? can you show me please how i can mount @home at /mnt/home for gaming? with better reading speed for larger games, snapshots and data integrity arent a concern in my case. thanks
Btrfs snapshotting and Arch seem made for each other, so I recommend keeping root on btrfs so you can roll back if needed. If storage performance is your main goal, I would look at a separate xfs formatted partition or drive for gaming.
😂 it is so much easier to delete the snapshots before you umount the chroot! But great video 😂 I like watching you Steven! I'm studying for my red hat systems Amin Im switching careers at a late age I've been with Arch for about 16 years! No Manjaro nor some distribution based off of arch but pure vanilla arch! I still have a dual core laptop that runs legacy 😂 but my main machines are new! First thing I do is rid microcrap opps Microsoft I mean! I subscribed too your channel today just to support someone that helps others!
@@stephenstechtalks5377 he has become supper busy and hasn't put out a vid in a long time but eflinux channel is superb to learn 💯 if you're like new too vanilla arch! He earned his Red hat certs and got a very busy job! I was a sub since almost his first video! I love the brother for his giving, I can't stand someone that acts like they are above all else because we all started not know jack 😂
I used the KDE lists. I did modify a few items that I do not need. I did read the materials about HDD with btrfs and though I am using a SMR Seagate HDD, I hope this will not become too much of a problem. Thank you for this video. I do have a couple question though; I am using a dual boot and did not see os-prober to detect Windows. When I attempted to install OS-Prober, I received an error message that a directory could not be found. I do not know if os-prober loaded or not. Can you assist? Is it possible to only save 1 snapshot before installing a package? I do not want to look at the time index to figure if the snapshot is before or after and do not feel I need both - if installation causes problems then revert back before install package.
Unfortunately I'm unable to assist with your hardware - every computer model is different, and it is very easy to break your Windows install! This is why Linux channels generally stick to virtualization to keep things safe. I very strongly suggest you only use a virtual machine to learn about Arch. Your spinning drive should do just fine with btrfs, and as demonstrated in this video you can create a single manual snapshot that you can roll back to, and then delete subsequent pre/post pairs if you don't need them. Good luck! :)
@@stephenstechtalks5377 Thank you for the fast reply. I have been using Arch Linux for awhile now but have always used ext4 not the btrfs. Windows is only for my wife and used the virtual drive with Windows but after upgrading to Windows 11, this slowed down my laptop and my wife was complaining. I went to physical, using an external drive so my wife does not need to have the Linux menu and she can just go into Windows.. i hope I can get os-prober to work because it will be great. Only reason I was wondering about the btrfs on the hard drive is because I chose to use the compression instead of turning off the P.O.W. with btrfs.
I had just installed Arch last week following someone else's guide but I couldn't get the snapshots to show up in the grub menu. I watched your video from a year ago with endeavorOS but i hit a road block. I followed every thing you said except I installed KDE and I have a seperate partion for /home from previous installs. i would like to get snapshots working for home. I guess I'll have to do some research. Also I hadn't use zram before and I'm used to having a swap partion. Even though my swap partion is not in the fstab it gets used and I have to disable it. I only have 16 G of ram on my main desktop. Do you think zram is good with only 16 G of actual ram?
Hi Rick, 16GB RAM is pretty standard these days for a workstation. :) You can leave swap (partition or zram) unconfigured; all that will happen is when the memory pressure reaches a certain point the systemd-oomd.service will start to kill processes to let off steam. Constantly writing to SSDs will wear them out prematurely so I avoid swap partitions and use zram instead. To get Snapper working for home, I suggest you repeat the process for root by setting up the /home/.snapshots subvolume. Then create the Snapper config for home per your requirements. Getting booting snapshots from the grub menu working takes patience and the precise procedures drift over time, which is why I keep releasing updated videos. What works fine last month sometimes doesn't work this month. It might just be a losing battle! Therefore, I strongly recommend *against* using production bare metal (with important data in your home directory!) while learning/testing/experimenting - set up and abuse virtual machines instead. Cattle, not pets! Also, you probably already make and test real offline backups so you don't risk your important stuff? It's a very steep learning curve, so be patient and have lots of fun!
@@stephenstechtalks5377 Thanks. I have a HP Z420 that I use for a server and play with VMs but I don't usually use UEFI on my VMs. I have a time getting a VM working for Windows 11. For Linux I don't bother with UEFI; when I try I don't get them to work. For quite a while, actually before I had the z420 for a server, OpenSuse Tumbleweed was my favorite distro, but I got a Canon printer that I thought would be compatible with anything since it has an Ethernet port but it's not easy to get it work with anything that is derived from Debian, Ubuntu, or Red Hat. I actually stayed up all night once and got it working with OpenSuse, but decided to try some other distros. For a while I used a Kubuntu Vm to set up the printer and share from it for a while. Anyway I noticed there were drivers for it in the AUR so I decided to try ARCH. I ran another Arch derived distro for a while. I have been running Linux long enough that I should be able to manage Arch, but there have been a lot of new things that last few years that are hard to keep up with. Thanks for all of your help. I already had an 8 GB swap partition set aside and even though I didn't add it to the fstab this time, the system is using it I may delete the partition or make it ext4 I'm relatively new to SSDs. Thanks again for your help
@Stephen's Tech Talks The zram has a priority of 100 and the swap partition is -2, so I guess I'll leave it. It will rarely be used but it shouldn't hurt anything.
I am on edge thinking about if to use swap file on my arch btrfs or use zram got 2tb nvme and 48 gb of ram. Which one is better/preferred? i highly doubt i be using 48 gb of ram at once
With 48GB I wouldn't bother with swap at all and let oomd take care of things on a workstation. :) *Unless* I'm running a mission-critical server and it uses most of the ram - then you'll run the risk of having services die unexpectedly which isn't any fun. Been there, done that! ;)
After many bad words, I downloded an ALCI Projext Pure Iso file. 6 minutes and I had Pure Arch installed . I really don't understand this stupid integralism about a graphic installer. Arch is a great distro, the only one I use.
Good video but not at all made for a beginner that's following along. Examples like, you talk about Nano but not how to get it. You talk about formatting and partitioning but that doesn't follow the archwiki in syntax. Not sure who this video is made for as an experienced arch user wouldn't be watching an arch install video in my opinion and a novice could no way follow your instructions as there is too much assumption and deviation from archwiki.
Noted! Nano is included in the arch boot iso - nothing to get. This video is a snapshot in time, the Arch Wiki is continuously evolving along with Arch itself - deviations can be significant but should not change the final outcomes. Try following along, step by step, and the Arch Wiki can help fill in knowledge holes. In Arch, there often are many different ways to accomplish the same thing. Be patient! Installing Arch from scratch can be daunting at first, especially for beginners. Rolling distros like Arch and Tumbleweed need care and maintenance post-install - I would not recommend these for beginners per se. Cheers!
Excellent video and Arch Linux insights getting transported here. Actually the best install video I have seen so far. Thanks for your work!
Glad it works for you!
Really great video. I much appreciate the content that you add! You one of the most comprehensive channels I have found when it comes to Arch. Always clear, concise, and on point. If you ever have time in the future I would really love to see how you'd set up btrfs with full disk encryption.
Glad to help!
Thank you for this excellent video. There were a couple of things I was missing when I was trying to install it by myself, but now everything works just fine. Many thanks!
Great to hear!
2:32. I also like enabling the verbosepkglist option, so the packages and dependencies list is easier to read during installation.
And I like adding "ILoveCandy" as well because I like cool looking pacman animation 😆.
Finally! Archinstall has been giving me bugs left and right... Was waiting on an "old way" tutorial of yours... Thanks!
Glad I could help!
No guns, no god, no politics..as always just Linux, and thank you Stephen for all your efforts. You and Erik Dubois have done so much for Linux users.
Thanks for your support!
Another excellent video! I have used Arch for about 5 years now and I always learn something new. Truly appreciate your time and efforts, thanks!
P.S. Would love to see that Arch Linux QEMU setup and configuration video if you think it would be worthwhile. Hoping to replace VirtualBox one of these days but the QEMU setup/config always turns me away compared to VB ease of use. :P
Thanks for the feedback and suggestion!
Good idea, I'm very interested in QEMU installation, setup and configuration too.
Thank you very much, Sir. This was awesome! Fast with small Tips, perfect.
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you!
You're welcome!
Have you tried using snapper-rollback from the AUR? It's supposed to do automatic rollback but on Arch Wiki's suggested layout.
Helpful as always
Glad you think so!
Dear Stephen, what a great video! I am using Arch for a bunch of years now. I think my first steps are 10 years ago. But anyway, if you have a running system, you stop reading man-pages and Wikis so much. Now i wanted to try something new (BTRFS) and found your video. But you got me in the first minutes by enabling parallel downloads in pacman. How could i missed such a great thing in all these years 😀. Anyway, thanks for this. I will later try to follow your video and installing Arch on BTRFS (and LUKS i guess, because why not ;-))
Hi Benjamin, thanks for the feedback and good luck on the LUKS setup!
Great content. I have built many machines using your tutorials. Would you have any content on how to install Arch using BTRFS with a separate physical home drive? Can’t seem to figure it out.
Great suggestion!
@@stephenstechtalks5377 thanks, want to use sub volumes for snapshots,etc. was able to do in ZFS on FBSD. I love FBSD but to limiting on software and features. Had to compile Chromium just to get pipe wire to work. Thanks again for your content!
Another great video Stephen. These days I use the archinstall script with a post install script with fixes and custimsations.
Indeed, thanks - hopefully the development of archinstall continues soon!
Could you possibly do a tutorial, similar to this one but with encrypted BTRFS fileystem (including /boot)? There are some articles about upgrading key derivation function for LUKS, and I want my system to be as secure as possible.
Appreciate the suggestion, cheers!
Steven do you do wm at all? I'm looking at some of the newer ones that are using Wayland! 😂 I haven't found anyplace that explains the key bindings however I'm using my scripted out win 10 no more telemetry 😂 no edge browser! And oh my how much faster
On occasion! :)
ruclips.net/video/NS1AuUiJszg/видео.html
Excellent tutorial Stephen, any chance of package list for Budgie desktop? with version 10.7 just newly released
Hi, thanks for the suggestion - that almost happened with this video, just needed more testing. Still on top of my list!
@@stephenstechtalks5377 I would imagine some of the packages might be "budgie" without the gnome meta package then "nemo" as nautilus has issues with theming, "dconfig" for changing nemo to be the default file manager and decent terminal should get you up and running with your current package list
in this configuration, will the system boot into previous snapshots from grub if the kernel is updated?
Previously, I had to deal with "problems" with this, I had to add a hook to copy the boot partition to each snapshot created. since in that configuration, the boot partition was moved to a separate partition and is not saved with each snapshot when snapper is launched.
And, the philosophical question is - how "safe" is it to keep the cores and partially boot partition on the same partition with the installed system?
(in the days of ext2/3/4, everyone was always advised to allocate a separate partition for boot)
And thank you so much for the detailed videos, as always everything is clear and reproducible step by step!
Should you run into a bad kernel update, I believe the previous snapshots are also affected since only the root partition is being snapshotted. A workaround that I typically use is install the LTS kernel as a fallback. :)
Would you use other mount options for HDD?
Arch wiki says "/efi is a replacement[6] for the historical and now discouraged ESP mountpoint /boot/efi"
Yup, this video is getting old! :)
These options should be fine for HDD as well.
i am still not clear why you changed your default subvol from 5 to /. i have almost same setup as yours & my @snapshots points to ./snapshot properly. i use snapper-rollback aur as mentioned in wiki. can you point me to some reference that it what would be the consequences if we dont do that and keep 5 as default.
PS. Awesome video as always and helpful.
isn't you could not delete the subvol cause you made that one default??
It's a strong possibility! :)
It's really just an old habit for documenting the booting snapshot. :) The snapper-rollback package comes in very handy - unfortunately it requires a different subvolume layout to this video. Thanks for sharing!
@@stephenstechtalks5377 Your welcome. Thank you for awesome tutorials, so i can say i use arch btw :)
hi stephen ,,, why you didnt use timeshift-autosnap i think that more simple as you explained in last video
Just mixing things up a little ;)
At each update Snapper runs grub-mkconfig to add a bootable snapshot to grub similar to what grub-btrfs does, from what I've seen. I've read on the Arch forum that this could cause the grub catastrophe after a grub update since grub-mkconfig was run without grub-install beforehand. So how do you proceed? There seems to be no consensus about what is the correct thing to do in this case...
Thanks for bringing this up! In my opinion, and what I do, is make sure to keep good backups of all important data. Then, should grub break, boot from an Arch-based (or compatible) USB drive, chroot into the existing Arch installation, and manually reinstall grub. This tutorial may be very useful:
forum.endeavouros.com/t/the-latest-grub-package-update-needs-some-manual-intervention/30689
@@stephenstechtalks5377 Yeah, I am familiar with the chroot method, although ideally I wouldn't want to do it (that's why I've switched to systemd-boot, which is not a perfect solution as I still prefer grub). Funny enough, I was using grub snapshots during the grub crisis but wasn't affected... Go figure.
Yes indeed, by some strange miracle I also escaped unscathed… ;)
man you are a genius, this is minimal and awesome and exactly like i would need it, i would also love it if you didnt use the script? or at least grouped them in a way that we could avoid some unneeded packages? just a suggestion.
Glad you like it! Didn't use the archinstall script in this video - did everything by hand. :) Used simple text package lists because I'm a terrible typist. These need regular updating - packages come and go!
1 more question: after rolling back pacman and paru have stopped making automatic snapshots?
The snap-pac package would need to be (re-)installed, and then automatic snapshots should work again. :)
thank you, that worked, im really fascinated by this system that you made, ive been exprimenting the whole day with it but i keep breaking it... i know it is rude of me and perhaps too much to ask from a man that already gave so much to the community, but i have a small wish that would be awesome if you could make a small short tinee tiny video and show us how to roll back from a bootable usb, perhaps how to use AUR snapper-rollback, and how to make exclusions for snapshots, as i am also gaming on this system and it gets very crowded... also it would be nice if you would show how to just roll back 1 certain subvol, lets say i have my own subvol for school and i have all my homeworks in there, and i only want that part to be rolled back and nothing else... thank you kind stephan
Thanks so much for the suggestion!
Great video! Question: how should mkdir -p /mnt/{/boot/efi,home,.snapshots.,var/{cache.log,lib/libvert/images}} read if not using libvert? just drop lib/libvert keeping ,images? Thanks again foe your hard work.
If you're not using libvirt/qemu/kvm virtualization, simply skip /var/lib/libvirt/images completely :)
Hmmm... seems my comment was deleted.
But fyi, you dont need to add user to scanner and lp groups. Wont post here the link as could be the reason why its deleted.
but under sane arch wiki. under 5.4 permission problem, it states that scanner and lp groups are deprecated.
Indeed, thanks for sharing! :)
is there any particular reason why you use btrfs home? it is not snapshotted as i understand? i mean for nomal usage it shouldnt be a problem but linux gaming is growing quite fast, so shouldnt it make more sense to just make a ext4 /home? or at least 1 ext4 partition mainly for steam, wine and similar stuff. just asking tho, i might be missing something, with fio benchmark i get half as good results with btrfs compared to ext4, comparing IOps and BW
Btrfs includes snapshotting capabilities by default. You can have as many subvolumes on a physical disk partition as you want - no need to predict how much space you need in home, for example. They all share the same space as if they were simple subdirectories on an ext4 filesystem... :)
Ext4 will always be faster than btrfs in my opinion because it does less. You might try playing around with the options in btrfs and see if you can improve things. The options in my videos generally work very well on the hardware I tested.
@@stephenstechtalks5377 thank you for great advice, its about a week that im watching youtube btrfs isntalls and testing on my LIVE SYSTEM, i still have some issues with grub-btrfs as it does not update grub menu accoridingly, daemon is started and enabled, @snapshots exists and is mounted, also i have run mkconfig grub but still its wrong, its basically always 1 reboot behind. when i remove somehting it takes 2 reboots for it to show in the grub menu... quite of a weird behaviour.
What about those 2 Subvolumes called portables and machines? At 25.40?
Where do they come from? Later you delete them with the rm *
Is it ok to just delete them?
Here's a good discussion - they get created by systemd, and I don't recall explicitly deleting them in this video:
forum.endeavouros.com/t/why-extra-subvolumes-when-installing-with-btrfs/24850
I recommend just ignoring and not deleting them!
Thanks for watching!
@@stephenstechtalks5377 at 34:56 you delete them with the rm -fr * command. Subvolumes can be deeleted by just deleting the directory.
@@philipmay9614 Yes, the entire contents of the undesired @ subvolume are deleted which is subsequently and wholly recreated from the desired earlier snapshot at 36:30. The Arch wiki has a more in-depth explanation. :)
how would you set up @home for gaming tho? would you keep the compression? or without compression? also should CoW be disabled? how would you improve read speed for a gaming home? can you show me please how i can mount @home at /mnt/home for gaming? with better reading speed for larger games, snapshots and data integrity arent a concern in my case. thanks
Btrfs snapshotting and Arch seem made for each other, so I recommend keeping root on btrfs so you can roll back if needed. If storage performance is your main goal, I would look at a separate xfs formatted partition or drive for gaming.
😂 it is so much easier to delete the snapshots before you umount the chroot! But great video 😂 I like watching you Steven! I'm studying for my red hat systems Amin Im switching careers at a late age I've been with Arch for about 16 years! No Manjaro nor some distribution based off of arch but pure vanilla arch! I still have a dual core laptop that runs legacy 😂 but my main machines are new! First thing I do is rid microcrap opps Microsoft I mean! I subscribed too your channel today just to support someone that helps others!
Thanks so much for your support! :)
Yes indeed, I learned the hard way about deleting snapshots, lol!
@@stephenstechtalks5377 he has become supper busy and hasn't put out a vid in a long time but eflinux channel is superb to learn 💯 if you're like new too vanilla arch! He earned his Red hat certs and got a very busy job! I was a sub since almost his first video! I love the brother for his giving, I can't stand someone that acts like they are above all else because we all started not know jack 😂
I used the KDE lists. I did modify a few items that I do not need. I did read the materials about HDD with btrfs and though I am using a SMR Seagate HDD, I hope this will not become too much of a problem. Thank you for this video.
I do have a couple question though; I am using a dual boot and did not see os-prober to detect Windows. When I attempted to install OS-Prober, I received an error message that a directory could not be found. I do not know if os-prober loaded or not. Can you assist?
Is it possible to only save 1 snapshot before installing a package? I do not want to look at the time index to figure if the snapshot is before or after and do not feel I need both - if installation causes problems then revert back before install package.
Unfortunately I'm unable to assist with your hardware - every computer model is different, and it is very easy to break your Windows install! This is why Linux channels generally stick to virtualization to keep things safe. I very strongly suggest you only use a virtual machine to learn about Arch.
Your spinning drive should do just fine with btrfs, and as demonstrated in this video you can create a single manual snapshot that you can roll back to, and then delete subsequent pre/post pairs if you don't need them. Good luck! :)
@@stephenstechtalks5377 Thank you for the fast reply. I have been using Arch Linux for awhile now but have always used ext4 not the btrfs. Windows is only for my wife and used the virtual drive with Windows but after upgrading to Windows 11, this slowed down my laptop and my wife was complaining. I went to physical, using an external drive so my wife does not need to have the Linux menu and she can just go into Windows.. i hope I can get os-prober to work because it will be great. Only reason I was wondering about the btrfs on the hard drive is because I chose to use the compression instead of turning off the P.O.W. with btrfs.
I had just installed Arch last week following someone else's guide but I couldn't get the snapshots to show up in the grub menu. I watched your video from a year ago with endeavorOS but i hit a road block. I followed every thing you said except I installed KDE and I have a seperate partion for /home from previous installs. i would like to get snapshots working for home. I guess I'll have to do some research. Also I hadn't use zram before and I'm used to having a swap partion. Even though my swap partion is not in the fstab it gets used and I have to disable it. I only have 16 G of ram on my main desktop. Do you think zram is good with only 16 G of actual ram?
Hi Rick, 16GB RAM is pretty standard these days for a workstation. :) You can leave swap (partition or zram) unconfigured; all that will happen is when the memory pressure reaches a certain point the systemd-oomd.service will start to kill processes to let off steam. Constantly writing to SSDs will wear them out prematurely so I avoid swap partitions and use zram instead.
To get Snapper working for home, I suggest you repeat the process for root by setting up the /home/.snapshots subvolume. Then create the Snapper config for home per your requirements.
Getting booting snapshots from the grub menu working takes patience and the precise procedures drift over time, which is why I keep releasing updated videos. What works fine last month sometimes doesn't work this month. It might just be a losing battle!
Therefore, I strongly recommend *against* using production bare metal (with important data in your home directory!) while learning/testing/experimenting - set up and abuse virtual machines instead. Cattle, not pets!
Also, you probably already make and test real offline backups so you don't risk your important stuff?
It's a very steep learning curve, so be patient and have lots of fun!
@@stephenstechtalks5377 Thanks. I have a HP Z420 that I use for a server and play with VMs but I don't usually use UEFI on my VMs. I have a time getting a VM working for Windows 11. For Linux I don't bother with UEFI; when I try I don't get them to work. For quite a while, actually before I had the z420 for a server, OpenSuse Tumbleweed was my favorite distro, but I got a Canon printer that I thought would be compatible with anything since it has an Ethernet port but it's not easy to get it work with anything that is derived from Debian, Ubuntu, or Red Hat. I actually stayed up all night once and got it working with OpenSuse, but decided to try some other distros. For a while I used a Kubuntu Vm to set up the printer and share from it for a while. Anyway I noticed there were drivers for it in the AUR so I decided to try ARCH. I ran another Arch derived distro for a while. I have been running Linux long enough that I should be able to manage Arch, but there have been a lot of new things that last few years that are hard to keep up with. Thanks for all of your help.
I already had an 8 GB swap partition set aside and even though I didn't add it to the fstab this time, the system is using it I may delete the partition or make it ext4 I'm relatively new to SSDs. Thanks again for your help
@Stephen's Tech Talks The zram has a priority of 100 and the swap partition is -2, so I guess I'll leave it. It will rarely be used but it shouldn't hurt anything.
Perfect, thanks for sharing!
i m also going arch baby in this 2023
Happy Arch trails!
I am on edge thinking about if to use swap file on my arch btrfs or use zram got 2tb nvme and 48 gb of ram. Which one is better/preferred? i highly doubt i be using 48 gb of ram at once
With 48GB I wouldn't bother with swap at all and let oomd take care of things on a workstation. :) *Unless* I'm running a mission-critical server and it uses most of the ram - then you'll run the risk of having services die unexpectedly which isn't any fun. Been there, done that! ;)
After many bad words, I downloded an ALCI Projext Pure Iso file. 6 minutes and I had Pure Arch installed . I really don't understand this stupid integralism about a graphic installer. Arch is a great distro, the only one I use.
Agreed, thanks for sharing! :)
Good video but not at all made for a beginner that's following along. Examples like, you talk about Nano but not how to get it. You talk about formatting and partitioning but that doesn't follow the archwiki in syntax. Not sure who this video is made for as an experienced arch user wouldn't be watching an arch install video in my opinion and a novice could no way follow your instructions as there is too much assumption and deviation from archwiki.
Noted!
Nano is included in the arch boot iso - nothing to get.
This video is a snapshot in time, the Arch Wiki is continuously evolving along with Arch itself - deviations can be significant but should not change the final outcomes.
Try following along, step by step, and the Arch Wiki can help fill in knowledge holes. In Arch, there often are many different ways to accomplish the same thing. Be patient!
Installing Arch from scratch can be daunting at first, especially for beginners.
Rolling distros like Arch and Tumbleweed need care and maintenance post-install - I would not recommend these for beginners per se.
Cheers!