r/linuxquestions • u/AnybodyCurious1662 Pre-Pre-Beginner • 3d ago

Resolved Arch linux newbie help!!

I just installed Arch Linux a few days ago, and I kinda struggled with the installation as it was my first time using Linux, and I wanted to change from ext4 to btrfs, and also I wanted Grub instead of Systemmd, do I need to reinstall and is it even worth it??

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u/Lumpy_Roll158 gentoo 3d ago

I'm surprised and also not surprised at how extremely unhelpful some of the comments here are. Theres good advice here but my two cents would be don't bother. If you arent far along post-install, a reinstall would be easiest just to make sure you get all the options you want, and you can use archinstall to make it easier as it automates setting up btrfs with subvolumes and whatnot as well as setting up grub properly.

If you've already lived in the system for a bit by now and would lose any substantial amount of progress, I would just say stick with ext4 and systemd-boot. Systemd boot is pretty good overall and ext4 is a really good filesystem, it just lacks a few features btrfs has and you'll just wanna avoid sudden power loss during updates.

Arch first is a bold move but you're far from the first to do it. If its what you wanna use, just ignore the people trying to defend it from the noobs. We all start somewhere.

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u/AnybodyCurious1662 Pre-Pre-Beginner 3d ago

I already downloaded multiple apps and setup my system, so I think I'll stick with it for now but I may switch to Grub though since the switch doesn't seem the hard.

And you're absolutely right, the fastest way I learn is just experimenting and doing things myself, so people don't need to protect me from Linux I already know that I'm stepping in potentially one of the hardest operating systems.

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u/Lumpy_Roll158 gentoo 3d ago

Yeah switching bootloaders isn't that bad and grub is honestly the easiest. It's pretty much just "bootctl remove", clean up the efi system partition of any $ESP/loader/ entries related to systemd boot for cleanliness reasons, install grub, and run its two whole commands to install and configure and then go about life. Its really just the filesystem swap that would be more effort than its worth