Pacharapol Withayasakpunt Pacharapol Withayasakpunt
Mon, April 26, 2021

How to Install Arch Linux, with desktop environment (KDE, Xfce)

Updated 2021-07-26

So, I happened to vanilla installed Arch Linux + incomplete KDE and several eye candies.

Caveat to installing

  • Remove secure boot
  • You need Internet Connection
    • If you don't have Wifi driver, you might need an Android device, with USB cable
    • rfkill unblock wifi is required in my case, even if there is Wifi driver bundled with the kernel
    • You might need git to clone AUR repo to install Wifi drivers.
  • Install networkmanager. No, there won't be iwctl or networkmanager, if you don't install it.
    • KDE will need networkmanager
    • Xfce will need networkmanager and network-manager-applet (yes, with hyphen between network and manager)
  • User management and install sudo
  • Install GRUB, but switch to rEFInd later, with cp /etc/os-release /boot/etc/os-release
  • Install yay. I know that Ubuntu / Debian do have apt search, but yay -Ss, yay -Qs searches the whole AUR and looks more powerful
  • Install missing drivers
  • Install not only plasma, but also kde-applications, just to uninstall many later. (Also installed sddm. Liked better than lightdm)
yay -Rc $(pacman -Qsq kde game) konsole dolphin konquerer kmail
yay -S terminator thunar chromium vscodium-bin vscodium-bin-marketplace
  • Does anyone really use Konquerer / Epiphany, BTW?
  • Editing Plasma desktop (KDE) to look like GNOME / Xfce.
  • Edit SDDM with Arch theme
  • Edit icons as deem fit, by editing ~/.local/share/application/**/*.desktop and finding the icons
find /usr/share/icons -iname '*.png'
  • Change Mail application to
[Desktop Entry]
Comment[en_US]=
Comment=
Exec=xdg-open https://mail.zoho.com/zm/#compose
GenericName[en_US]=
GenericName=
Icon=internet-mail
MimeType=
Name[en_US]=Email in browser
Name=Email in browser
Path=
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-DBUS-ServiceName=
X-DBUS-StartupType=
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=

What about your desktop?

Doesn't have to be Arch. Might be i3wm or Openbox or something else. Care to share your customization?

(BTW, I don't know if I will survive if I tried non-systemd, like Artix.)

Arch desktop

Arch icons

Updated 2021-07-26

Recently, I got hooked into installing BTRFS properly in Arch. I wrote instruction scripts here (and tested).

https://github.com/patarapolw/arch-btrfs