Installing Arch

I've always been a bit of a Linux nut, but never had the courage to delete my lovely Linux Mint installation and to switch over to the mythical Arch. However, after I accidentally bricked my Mint setup by forcing a shutdown while my VM was running, I decided I wouldn't even try to fix Mint, and instead, I would go wholeheartedly into Arch. After I frantically recovered all of my data from Mint using a recovery USB, I tried to install an Arch ISO onto a USB. Easy first step right? What I didn't know was that my antivirus software on Windows didn't play nice with the USB writer software I had. I somehow fried two of my USB drives, which are now undetectable by Windows. I resorted to ordering 3 new USB drives from Newegg, but I ended up frying one of the new ones too. Frustrated, I used the recovery Linux to use dd to simply copy all the bits over to the USB. With a working Arch image in hand, it was now time for the hard part.

I was familiar with the process of installing Linux to dual boot with Windows on different partitions, but Mint gave me a nice GUI that I just pointed and clicked on. Arch gave me a nice terminal that greeted me with root@arch-iso I slowly learned how to find my disks and partitions through much trial and error, and eventually, I cleaned out my old partitions and mounted them for a fresh new install of Linux. I figured I had a decent knowledge of Linux and my system, so I casually ignored a few steps. I gradually came to understand that every word on the Arch wiki is gold and I am not a special snowflake.

After researching the dozens of Arch's suggestions on various programs, I ended up using a LDM Cinnamon DE setup. Cinnamon was what I was familiar with and I really liked it over all of the other desktop environments. I set up my Nvidia drivers correctly, customized my Cinnamon theme (which uses CSS thankfully), and installed the freshest version of Sublime Text 3 on the market. Finally, I restarted to see if my Nvidia drivers would offer the hardware acceleration that Cinnamon wanted, and my computer simply didn't boot into Arch anymore.

Confused and upset, I tried to google my problems, "Arch Linux not booting." Sadly enough, this was the most descriptive I could get on my problem, as it didn't even show a terminal anymore. Fortunately, my problem just happened to pop up as the 4th result on Google. It turns out that pacman had attempted to update the Linux kernel, but I hadn't set my boot partition to automount. After updating the Linux kernel once more with my Arch USB, I finally had a beautiful working Arch system.

Lessons I've learned from this 8 hour struggle with the machine include:

Always fully read the Arch Wiki. Always.
Other people are just as bad as me at Linux.
Struggling through problems actually teaches me a lot about my system.

Can I say that I've actually benefitted from using Arch? Probably not. Do I know inside that I'm a better coder for going through this pain? Again, definitely no. However, I now have the most bleeding edge software and a slightly slower computer. Was it worth it? Totally.