Since nobody else said it: make sure you have backups of any data you don’t want to lose. It’s really easy to accidentally partition any connected drive and wipe your data on it. (Learned it the hard way, but at least I had backups.)

A lot easier than Gentoo

Now I’m kind of wanting to go mess with Gentoo again…

Easy if you go step by step and don’t accidentally skip anything. Archinstall will get you to the same result with lower risk of failure, in a tenth of the amount of time spent. And unless you install operating systems for a living, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Source: Installed Arch on about a dozen different devices, twice without Archinstall.

If you’re looking to learn something, do Linux from Scratch instead. The process is way more granular, way more documented, and way more educational than parroting the steps of installing Arch from the wiki.

Just follow the wiki and you’ll be fine. I did it when I was in highschool. My friend showed me Ubuntu and I used it for about a month then jumped straight to arch

Cant do if you never try

It’s better than it used to be. It might still require some basic cli skills. Especially formatting disks and mount points. And file system types. Etc.

I know manjaro makes it even easier.

Endeavour os done.

There is no such thing as easy or hard.

Give it a try, fuck it up, and give it a try again. Try not to fuck it up in the same way as the first time. Repeat until it works - it will work eventually.

It took me about 6 hours and 3 disk re-formats my first time. I was particularly bad at it. I barely knew what a disk was, nevermind a partition.

Actually I’m still not sure what a partition is.

You’ll do fine :)

The wiki holds your hand through it so it’s pretty easy.

i can do it on about 15 minutes without the wiki for a fairly basic install

and then about 30 minutes to set up sway how i want, install common software i like, etc

but for a more complex setup it will take longer and i will need to check the wiki

I had done a few easier Linux installs on Raspberry Pis and VMs in the past, but when I decided I wanted to try using Linux as my daily driver on my desktop (dual-booted with Windows at the time) I decided to go with a manual Arch install using a guide and I would 100% recommend it if you’re trying to pick up Linux knowledge. It’s really not a difficult process to just follow step-by-step, but I looked up each command as they came up in the guide so I could try to understand what I was doing and why.

I don’t know what packages archinstall includes because I’ve never used it, but really the biggest thing for me learning was booting into a barebones Arch install. Looking into the different options for components and getting everything I needed setup and configured how I wanted was invaluable.

That being said, now that I know how, is that how I would choose to install it? Nah, I use the CachyOS installer now, but if I wanted stock Arch I’d probably use archinstall.

It’s as easy as following any set of instructions. Whether or not you actually understand what the instructions are doing is an entirely different story. If you actually want to learn how to operate a posix system, doing a bunch of command line installs of Linux isn’t going to help you with that. What will help is living in something with excellent documentation like OpenBSD, with minimal reliance on external tooling. Once you have the skills, they’ll transfer anywhere.

Easy or not depends vary wildly. But the usual task is

• partition the drive
• format the drive
• mount the drive
• install the base system

That is the bare minimum, but we need to do more configuration to be able to boot. Hence the next task is configuring the following

• fstab
• timezone, hostname, and networking
• boot loader (I just use the EFI directly nowadays)

That is it. Everything else is usually work specific. Like, if you wanted arch to be a server, you usually didn’t install a GUI. For workstation and gaming, you need more steps but it will vary depending on hardware. The archwiki covers a good deal of hardware from laptop to desktop and their quirks.

It’ll depend a lot on your experience. I can just install Arch without reading the wiki at all in about 5 minutes for something fairly vanilla. If you’re comfortable with Linux then following the wiki won’t be too hard, took me maybe 2-3 hours on my first install before I had my DE and everything all set up (12 years ago). If you’ve never used Linux before and take the deep dive then it could take hours and days depending on how fast you can absorb all that information.

“Easy” is very subjective, there’s stuff that’s so dumbed down for the sake of “easy” that it makes my life harder when I need to do more complex stuff. I know people for whom linear algebra in 11 dimensions is easy for them to do and solve. Easy is relative to your own personal experience level and what you’re trying to accomplish.

Install it in a VM as a test run, you’ll see by yourself.

Why no arch install?