A few years ago, I started using Arch Linux as my daily os. Through these years I managed to break my system quite a few times - sometimes it required a few days of googling, sometimes a whole reinstallation was needed to fix it. To be fair, I think arch is neat, it just wasn’t the right os for me at the time.

Keep in mind, that I was not an experienced arch user, when I encountered those problems. Now I know that I should’ve done some things differently. But hey, that’s what learning is all about!

Here are my stories.

installation

That’s where the problems began.

The first time when I was installing arch, I didn’t know any better, and was following a random youtube tutorial, instead of the official arch wiki.

• wi-fi wasn’t working, as the tutorial only showed how to set everything up with an Ethernet cable connected
• following the tutorial, I created a few partitions without any reason behind it
• I didn’t set up the repository mirrors correctly (which turned out to be a problem a year later)

“I haven’t updated my system in a while, and I installed one package, and it broke”

I had arch installed both on my laptop and my PC. As I used to game on Windows at the time, I wouldn’t boot arch for months.

One time, when booted it after such a long break, I tried installing a new package, without updating the system beforehand. It must’ve messed something up with system libraries, because suddenly almost no commands would work anymore. What is more, pacman itself was exiting with an error, and so I couldn’t fix the problem by just updating the system now.

Somehow, I managed to save my system, by booting from USB and vigorously typing commands I found on forums. It did require removing some system files, and installing them again, but I succeeded.

”my battery died during pacman -Syu”

pacman is a package manager on arch. To install a new package, you type pacman -S <package name>, and pacman -Suyto update everything.

So, ran pacman -Syu, while at ~3%, and it simply died. It was impossible to to boot the system, as one of the packages was corrupted.

I remained calm, grabbed a USB with arch on it, and tried to somehow fix the problem, by googling on my PC/phone, and typing commands on my laptop. But:

• I couldn’t install any packages - I was getting an error that the package database is locked. Understandable, the update process locked the packages index, and didn’t unlock it, because it died with my battery. The first few commands I found at forums didn’t help, but I somehow managed to unlock it.
• I tried reinstalling the corrupted package - I couldn’t because multiple packages depended on it. I tried applying different advice I found on the internet - removing the offending files, etc, but nothing helped.
• Then, when I eventually removed the package, I couldn’t install it again. In fact, I couldn’t install any package - pacman couldn’t verify their signatures. I suspect it had something to do with the way I set up my arch during installation, but I’m not sure.
• Somewhere along the process, pacman started reporting that it cannot verify integrity of the “linux” package any more. Then, I came up with a brilliant idea: let’s remove linux! And install it again! Pacman happily removed the crucial packages, but couldn’t install them again.

At this point my computer didn’t even show any error messages anymore, when trying to boot. It was just a black screen.

I had to do a completely fresh installation. Fortunately, I knew how to access my home directory, so I didn’t lose any data. Unfortunately, I still didn’t know how to set up Wi-Fi and audio properly, so I had to spend a few hours fixing it again. Since then, I set up a script, that checks my battery before every update, and yells at me if it’s too low.

bootloader

Shortly after, I had to install Ubuntu on the same machine, dual-booting it with Arch.

The last time I reinstalled arch, I was using archinstall, and when it prompted me to choose the bootloader, I didn’t know what to do - whether to use grub, or systemd-boot. I googled “systemd-boot vs grub”, and found one person on reddit saying “systemd-boot bettter”, so I went with it, despite having no experience with it.

And now, my bootloader couldn’t find the Ubuntu installation. I didn’t know how to add its entry to systemd-boot configuration file, nor could I find any easy tutorials online. I was in a loop of editing the config files, rebooting my laptop, checking if ubuntu is there, failing to find it, and editing config files again, then rebooting again and again …

Then, in an act of desperation, I uninstalled systemd-boot, and formatted the boot partition (big brain time). I ended up with a machine with no bootloader installed.

Somehow, after even more googling, I managed to install grub, and get it to load arch. From there, I ran osprobe, and was finally able to boot Ubuntu.

audio broke

That was the thing that finally broke me.

After a long day, I just wanted to watch some Netflix, and relax. My system had other plans.

It stopped playing all sounds. I didn’t do anything - my system had been running stable for quite a long time at the moment, and yet, it just stopped working. It took me a few hours of going through arch forums and stackexchange to find something that would help me.

So, I had pulseaudio installed. However, during a system update, GSConnect pulled pipewire and wireplumber as its dependency (I think). Then, two audio managers were running at the same time, which was causing the audio sink to get suspended, and no audio would play.

I was able to fix that, but it was just too much for me.

honourable mentions

• I was never able to set up a printer properly. My machine was an old Samsung printer, and I couldn’t find the drivers anywhere. And so, whenever I needed to print or scan something, I just booted windows instead. Only when I completely purged Windows from my laptop, was I able to finally fix it - because now I had to learn how to use CUPS.
• I could never get an external microphone to work.
• My system would just crash sometimes. It would work just fine, and then, suddenly - a black screen. I did check the logs, but it would happen so rarely that I didn’t bother to try and fix it.
• For some reason, I couldn’t configure a custom DNS resolver. I tried again and again for an hour, only to realize that I have three network managers running at once, and that’s why I can’t configure anything.
• It took me 4 attempts to install nvidia drivers.

Conclusion

I wanted to share the stories I had with arch. Maybe they will provide a useful insight into the mistakes people new to arch make, and how they approach solving issues they encounter.

Even though I’m not using arch at the moment (proud Fedora user here), I did learn a lot over my time when daily driving it. For example, how to maintain my system, how to diagnose and fix problems, how to properly use config files, how systemctl works, how to use journalctl. I’m not afraid of using the terminal anymore, I know how to write complex bash scripts. Whenever I see a command online, I more or less have some intuition of what it does now.

From time to time, I get this urge to install arch again. I feel like tinkering with my system, like having a truly mine, customized system. But in the end, it’s just too much work.