 Installing Arch Linux is not as hard as it used to be. In the past, if you wanted to install vanilla Arch Linux, you would have to download the ISO and go to the wiki and follow the instructions. It's not like that anymore. Now even if you download the ISO, there is a guided installer right on the Arch ISO that will walk you through it perfectly fine. Most people will find that method fairly easy. For those of you and really for me as well that aren't interested in going through that type of installer and would prefer something that is a GUI based installer, there are dozens of different GUI Arch Linux installers. Some of them just install Arch Linux, some of them are more Arch based distros, things like endeavor. So the point is there isn't a lack of installers out there for you to choose from. Pretty much however you would like to install Arch Linux, there's a way for you to do it that way. So when I find a brand new Arch Linux installer, I'm usually pretty underwhelmed because it's not all that exciting because there's three dozen of them and they don't really stand apart from each other at all. I mean they are all variations of whatever. But recently I decided I was going to hop away from endeavor. I was done with my long term review. I had made some b-roll for future videos and I was ready for something new. But I know from experience, from almost five years of Linux experience, I know that I'm not happy unless I have the AUR. So I knew whatever I was going to hop to was going to have to be Arch Linux. And it has been a long time since I ran vanilla Arch Linux. It's been at least two years. I installed it the official way a couple of years ago just to say that I had done so. I needed to get that badge for my Linux vest or whatever. And after that it was all Arch-based Linux distros for me because it's just easier to install Arch through an Arch-based distro than through the text installer. So it has been a while since I was driving vanilla Arch Linux. So I decided that I was going to test out one of these GUI installers that really just installs Arch Linux. It doesn't install anything else. It's just Arch Linux but with like a Calamari's installer. So someone on the Discord recommended a installer called Arch Linux GUI. And basically what Arch Linux GUI is, is a Arch Linux ISO with a Calamari's installer attached to it. That's really all it is. It's nothing special and it doesn't try to sell itself as anything other than that, which is something that I enjoy. Now it does have several different additions. So it does things in addition to installing Arch. It also installs a graphical environment for you installed Xorg. So that was also something that I was kind of looking for because I didn't want to have to go through that kind of work. Way too much work. So if we go to the website of Arch Linux GUI, we'll see that it actually has a fairly good website here and there's a lot of information and there's a lot of different additions. The Plasma, GNOME, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, and then there's a couple window manager additions too. I believe they have i3 and BSPWM. There's nothing here that's really all that themed. They use a dark arc theme, I think it is, through pretty much all their additions. But other than that, they've done nothing in terms of theming, ricing, making it their own, whatever. It's literally just Arch Linux with a few tweaks in terms of what it looks like and adding on Xorg and whatever desktop environment you've chosen. So if you want to install Arch, like I did, I would recommend downloading this because it's actually really good. So what I'm going to do today is actually take you through a install of Arch Linux GUI. I have this set up in a virtual machine, so I'm going to go ahead and hit finish here and we'll go ahead and full screen this and hit enter. And it will launch into the installer. So when you first boot into it, this is what you get. This is the plasma version. And there's no installer that pops up, nothing like that. You don't even have an icon for you. You have to actually search for it. I believe it's under utilities. Maybe it's under system. Yeah, it's under system. It's right here. Install Arch Linux. And once it does pop up, you'll see that it's just a standard Calamari installer. No frills. One of the things that I wish they would do during the install process is allow you to enable multi lib, the 32 bit libraries for steam. It's not enabled out of the box, which is not surprising. It's just installing Arch Linux. But I would like that option during the installer or sometime during that period because I went to install steam and it wasn't actually in the repo. So I was like, where the hell is steam? And then I remembered that multi lib isn't actually enabled by default in Arch. So I had to go into pacman.com, I believe it is, and enable it there. It was not a big deal. It's just something that would be kind of cool to have that as an option in the installer. But I also understand that that adds extra stuff to the installer. That's not really the purpose of this. The purpose is to be as vanilla as possible. It's kind of doing what endeavor tried to try to do. But they took it even a step farther and kind of became an arch based distro, whereas this is actually installing Arch. That's all it's doing. So let's go ahead and run through the installer. So American English is fine. We'll choose Detroit do next. That is the proper keyboard. Next you raise disk. I will go ahead and leave no swap, but I will choose butterf s this time. And I will then hit next again, we'll enter our credentials. This is Arch VM and enter a very complicated password. Use that for the administrator account as well. Hit next again, hit install. And then that's it. That's the entire installer. You couldn't get a more vanilla Calamari's experience than that. So I will cut the video here and come back when it's done. OK, that took about four minutes or so, maybe a bit longer. I'm going to go ahead and hit restart now and then we'll restart this. You're going to have to forgive the dog out there. Unfortunately, she decided to bark during this as she usually does. Now they did go, they did theme grub as you can see there. So they've done that. We'll make this full screen again. Enter the password. They themed the SDDM as well, at least in terms of adding a wallpaper. And then I will make the display resolution better. So Xrander dash S 1920 by 1080. OK, there we go. Now you won't see a welcome screen or anything like that. This is just Arch Linux. Now in terms of installed software, there's not a lot of stuff here. They have LibreOffice. There is VLC. There's Firefox. There's Gwynvue and a few of the KDE applications, but not the whole suite, for sure, not the whole suite. And there are a few development applications as well that you see on some certain applications, certain distros. Now, there's a few things that you should keep in mind if you end up using this. The first thing is that for whatever reason, when you install this for the first time, you're going to have a ton of updates. So you'll have to run sudo pacman dash s y y u right up top. The thing is, you can't do this first. I found that if you just go and install the updates, you're going to end up with a ton of PGP errors, just like seven or eight of them. It's just not so. So in order to solve that PGP error, the first thing you need to do is update the mirrors and then sudo pacman dash s arch Linux key ring and enter that. It'll ask you for your password somewhere along the line. And then once that's installed, then you can do sudo pacman dash s y y u. And then what you'll see here is that there is actually a ton of actual updates. This is pretty odd for a vanilla arch Linux, simply because usually when you install arch Linux, you're installing through the internet here, everything that you install to actually get to a proper working system is downloaded directly from the arch repositories. And there's no delay there. There's like you're not using it, even if you're using an older ISO, the ISO is not where you're getting the packages. All the packages are being pulled from the internet. Whereas this is pulling everything from the ISO, as far as I can tell. And that's the reason why you have just an absolute crap ton of updates. So that is definitely one difference that you're going to you're going to face here. So once you've done an update, you have a full working system. The only other thing that I ended up having to do that was specific to this distribution was enable multi lib so that I could actually install steam. Other than that, it's just a basic arch Linux distro. So if we do neofetch here, we see that this is actually arch Linux. It's using it has about 179 packages installed as has bashed five dot one. This is plasma five dot two three dot four. And that's one of the reasons why there's so many updates because that's no longer the most recent version of plasma. So this is a fairly old ISO. We also have the kernel five dot 15, which is also a fairly old kernel. So like I said, when you install this, just know that the ISO itself seems to be fairly old and it's installing everything off in the ISO and it's not a net install at all. So you should be able to do this offline. I'm not actually sure of that. I didn't try it, but I do know that it doesn't pull all that stuff down during the installation. That's the reason why there's so many updates. So that is Arch Linux GUI. And honestly, I like it. I don't care for the fact that there's a ton of updates afterwards. I would prefer a net install, something that pulled all the most recent packages right during the installer, but it's not a big deal. As long as you go into it knowing that you're going to have to do an update right after you install, which is something you probably should do. Anyways, you know, it's not that big a deal. I also have no issues with the small amount of theming that they've done. I usually change all that stuff. Anyways, I went through and installed I3 and just decided to use all my I3 stuff. So the theming doesn't bother me at all. If you're looking for a way to install vanilla Arch Linux, this is a good one. Now, comparing it to some of the other installers, it's similar, right? It's not necessarily the best. It's not necessarily the worst. I know that there are several out there that are net installs that actually pull the packages directly from Arch Linux and do basically the same thing as this does, but will avoid the necessity of having to do like a gigabyte worth of updates, you know, right upon installation. So those might perhaps be a little bit better for some people. This here didn't bother me, but I could see that the net install will be better for some people. I do prefer this over something like Endeavor, simply because there's no opinionated stuff here. This is just Arch Linux with a few programs installed and a desktop environment installed. That's literally all there is. Now, I didn't mention this before when we were looking at the website. They do have a pure version where you can install something that is much more similar to what you'd get with Arch Linux. You just get booted into a TTY and then you'd have to install all the stuff yourself. So they do have that version. If that's what you're interested in and you want to go through and do all of the work yourself, similar to what you would have to do if you just installed them on Arch Linux. So that is it for this video. If you have thoughts on this, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Siddha Devon, Patrick, Megalyn, JaxximeTools, Steve A. Sebrega, Linux, Garrett, Samuel, Mitchell, ArchCenter, CarbonData, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Martin, Andy, Merrick, Kamp, Drashville, Dadaug, Peteray, Crucible, Darkman, and Station Play Day and Primus. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.