arch-desktop

arch-desktop

This repository contains automation to establish a highly functional and lightweight desktop environment.

It was originally written to parity debian-stretch-desktop.

As there are no "releases" to match, this repository will instead be updated over time as is needed.

why

I have been a debian proponent for years, and will continue to be for servers.

However, the 6 months prior to a new debian release are horrible for desktop users.

Additionally, if attempting to upgrade hardware the lack of up to date drivers due to locked kernel are a serious pain.

Finally, having now used Arch as my main system for nearly 6 months I am shocked at how stable it is.

builds

You can build locally using packer, and vagrant.

The image produced will take up over 5GB, and any time you rebuild you may need to run vagrant box remove arch-desktop to ensure it updates the image.

The first supported VM system is virtualbox, and can be built like this:

cd virtualbox
packer build packer.json
vagrant up

The second supported system is libvirt, and can be built like this:

cd libvirt
packer build packer.json
vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt
vagrant up

This assumes you have libvirt, kvm, qemu, virt-install, and edk2-ovmf packages installed and running on your host.

If you encounter issues with temporary directory space during post-processing you may need to set TMPDIR to a path on your main disk.

When using libvirt with vagrant, you will want to launch virt-manager to open the graphical interface (no combination of graphics_type or video_type seemed to launch a GUI and instead just crashed with errors).

Additionally, when testing a fresh build you may need to use virt-manager to delete the former arch-desktop image from the storage pool in addition to removing it from vagrant (eg. vagrant box remove arch-desktop libvirt), since vagrant box does not appear to be connected.

usage

If you are installing on real hardware you can run these commands from the arch installation terminal:

pacman -S git
git clone https://git.caseydelorme.com/cdelorme/arch-desktop.git
cd arch-desktop
./setup/install.sh

This may ask for input, and will reboot when finished.

notes

I ran into quite a few interesting caveats during the creation of this project, and wanted to comment on them.

The pinned comments on the AUR are offensive to beginners and do not answer any questions, RTFM does not explain how to actually fix GPG signature errors. The wiki is useful, but it is hard to pin down what you are looking for. So good job being useless by threatening a ban hammer on comments with questions related to the lack of clear instructions on packages.

The makepkg restriction that prevents execution as root is dumb as hell. I get the security constraints, but the instructions to run as nobody are hella flawed; test suites basically can't run as nobody due to directory permissions (so many with loads of undocumented ENV variables), and creating a faux user from a script just to install some relatively common and popular packages seems like a ridiculous work-around. So great job making automation harder and solving nothing.

Finally, while I am not a fan of how systemd forced proliferation into all linux distributions, nor do I care for binary logs (that seems like a major step backwards), I am incredibly thankful for how simple bootctl made EFI bootloader setup, and also user-space unit files. However, this also means traditional DOS/BIOS boot loaders such as grub are not supported by these scripts. I only wish there was a more clear way to deal with setting up user-space files from scripts during arch installation.

references

• Arch Installation Guide
• old arch docs in system-setup
• arch efi installation guide by GloriousEggroll
• Arch Wiki NVidia Documentation
• Arch Wiki makepkg
• Arch Wiki AUR
• ip command cheatsheat
• packer-arch by elasticdog
• touchpad configuration
• yay AUR Package Manager
• Wayland