Seven hours. That’s how long it took me to get a black screen that simply said “No bootable Device found”. Not a fancy desktop, not a login prompt. Just arch linux completely unimpressed with my efforts.
/arch by the way
Everyone in IT has heard it at least once: ‘I use Arch, by the way’. Whether as a meme or from an actual person in the room – said just loudly enough to make sure you heard it. That saying is used by someone who wants you to know they’re built different. Installed from documentation only, on his ThinkPad, obviously.
So I decided yesterday to find out for myself. To answer the question if it really is that hard or if they are just gatekeeping. Spoiler: kind of both?
/how hard could it be?
Now with the challenge set, I downloaded the arch .iso from their website , verified the checksum to make sure it hasn’t been altered during the install (HTTP mirror, so this step is not optional). Made it bootable with “Fedora Media Writer” since my main PC is running on Fedora 44 “btw” and then rebooted my laptop with USB stick in and spammed my F12 on repeat.
I selected the Arch Linux boot option, then the screen went black. Only light source is the terminal prompt and the blinking cursor. I didn’t know it yet, but I’d be seeing this screen again, multiple times on that day.
For my first try on this system, I set myself another goal. To just try it with the official documentation, no videos on youtube or any other source to help me out. I wanted to know how a complete noob (beginner) like me would do in this challenge.
I followed it thoroughly, every highlighted link, every rabbit hole it sent me down to a new documentation page explaining how that specific function, package or command works and why it needs to be set.
Probably 75% of my time was reading rather than typing and “advancing” in the arch journey. I wanted to get it right, but more importantly, I wanted to actually understand what I was doing.
After about seven hours of configuration, I restarted my machine as stated by step 4 of the arch documentation: “Finally, restart the machine by typing reboot“
The screen went black. I hard-rebooted and went into the UEFI – only to find my USB stick as the only bootable device listed there. I thought and hoped that it might only be a display error. I pulled out the USB stick and and rebooted one last time. Four words: “No bootable device found”.
/okay, youtube time
Seven hours, nothing tangible to show for it. I was bummed, but more than that I was confused – where did I go wrong? What did I forget? I needed to know why it failed. First though, I needed a break.
A movie night later with my wife, the motivation was back. Arch Linux will run on this machine today. That was the mission.
Here I said to myself, I tried the documentation route and it had humbled me. It is pretty hard if you only do it with the official documentation itself. So it is time to consult people who’d actually done this before – so I opened YouTube and looked for a digestible tutorial. I wasn’t looking for someone to just do it for me – I still wanted the challenge.
Turns out that wasn’t a problem at all, because no two people install Arch the same way anyway. I had to take parts from different guides, a step from here, a config from there. In the end it was still my Arch installation. I remember that I used 3 Guides to piece my OS together.
The YouTube route was a solid guideline, some stuff I had to reconfigure that I lost before like language packages and keyboard layout. The swiss layout in particular is its own adventure: one locale wants “de_CH-latin1”, another just wants “ch”. Consistency seems to be optional sometimes.
On the partitioning step I found my previously configured drive still the same as before, so not everything was lost after all. The problem from before therefore has to be somewhere with the bootloader setup. I scrapped all the configs of the drive anyway, because I wanted to try out another command-line tool for partitioning.
After all that I installed some packages I wanted to have on my OS, essentials like networkmanager to be able to connect to networks, sddm for my login screen after booting etc.
The full (future) setup deserves its own post once I’ve spent more time with it.
/it actually worked
Second installation, everything would be different this time – YouTube Guides, fresh motivation, a better partitioning scheme. I rebooted. The terminal prompted me for my username – no graphical login screen, no desktop.
Why is there no login screen? The installation is done, as per the guides and everything, why don’t I see the login screen?
Turns out sddm doesn’t just start itself – you have to enable it manually. Ofcourse you do. One “systemctl enable sddm” later, I rebooted for what it felt like the 100th time.
And there it was. An actual login screen, fairly dated looking that reminded me of Windows 7 times, but I didn’t care. It was there. Per documentation the theme is fully customizable anyway, beacuse with linux everything lives in a config file somewhere.
I typed my password, hit enter, and I was then greeted with big, beautiful splash of nothingness. A completely black screen, again. Ah right, I had no desktop environment yet – thats right I.
So I installed myself Hyprland, the very good looking windows tiling manager that per reputation has one of the best customization options. That’s where I am right now – trying to make my OS beautiful and mine.
/summary of arch
So, is Arch really that hard? Kind of – but not in the way those “I USE ARCH BTW” guys want you to think. It’s not hard because you need to be a genius, it’s hard because it forces you to actually understand what you’re doing. Every error, every reboot, every config file is teaching you something that a normal OS installation just doesn’t do or is doing it in the background without you knowing.
I’d honestly do it again and I will do it again because I like the feeling of building and owning my own things. This challenge was merely a step for me to test out the water.
I think everyone should do it at least once. Not to brag about it, no. Just to know.