Why is this Arch Linux such a big deal among people? It can’t be that tough! I’ll just install it and see for myself.
So, here I am, installing a new Linux flavor just for the heck of it. But I won’t replace my current OS just yet. Let me install it in a virtual box. After an easy download from their website, I have my hands on the iso image and I fire up my virtual box. I mistype the app name in excitement of a new Linux. Damn you, brain!
It asks me to boot Arch Linux. No option to install it? Weird. I select the first option and boot into Arch Linux. After 5 secs, I find myself at the shell, logged in as the root. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s just a geeky way of saying that I am logged in as the system admin. Maybe a little complex than that. What is happening?! Where’s the GUI? Where’s the installer? What kind of an OS is this? I hate command line. I Google for what to do and am not disappointed. A wonderful article comes to my rescue. Hey, that looks kinda easy! I can work with that. Suddenly, all this does not seem daunting anymore. My love for command line interface (cli) is restored. Long live cli! I start typing in commands one after another and after changing my partition table about 5 times, (yes, I played around and made an EFI partition, unlike what’s given in the article) the OS is installed. The best thing about it was that the latest software was downloaded at the time of update and installed! (although it took ages to download, sigh!) A downside maybe that it can’t be installed while offline but that isn’t a problem for me.
After reboot, I’m shown a login shell. But I never made a user? I only created a password for the root. Ok, got it. I log in as the root user and the first thing I do is ls, followed by pwd (just Linux commands for listing files and printing the current working directory, respectively). So I have no files and I’m in the root folder. Let me see the contents of the '/' directory. Well, the filesystem sure is Linux like. I think I like it like this. Nothing but the shell. Also, I think I’ll see how to get a display manager and a desktop environment working on this one. If I’m successful, goodbye Elementary! I check the kernel version. 4.9.11. That’s just like 15 days old! Damn, this thing’s updated! And yes, this is really so cool, I’m gonna show it off to everyone. Oh, I’m gonna flaunt it at every possible opportunity!
-ut