arch desktop setup

guaranteed far too ugly and vanilla to ever be posted on r/unixporn

This repo is very much based on/inspired by: https://github.com/octetz/linux-desktop. I chose not to fork since I don't want st or dwm setup but very much indebted to josh (octetz)'s handy lof script and such. If I write anything meaningful/helpful I'll contribute back.

This is a set of scripts to setup a pretty boring graphical environment on an Arch Linux installation. It's pretty boring but simple and reproducible in case I break my install.

setup

On a fresh install of Arch in VirtualBox or a PC with AMD CPU, nvidia GPU, all you should have to do is run the following commands and enter your sudo password when prompted:

# install packages
make install

# setup desktop and dotfiles
make config

Make sure the pacstrap command inclues the packages base-devel and git.

Makefile Details

# install required packages from official respositories and aur
make install

# install dotfiles and basic system config (nvim, tmux, aliases, xorg, xfce4)
make config

# print a crudely formatted list of targets
make list

gaming

The script pkg/steam-install.sh should help getting steam setup. It's not automated but mainly a sequence of steps to get Steam, required fonts, and graphics drivers for NVIDIA only installed.

Games I've successfully played on this Arch install:

Control Ultimate Edition

Games I'm planning to play but haven't made time yet:

Hades
Terraria
Halo Master Chief Collection
Splitgate
Portal

learnings

multiple monitors

Don't try too hard when setting up monitors and make xorg do most of the work. I was using the wrong xrandr command to setup output when I should have left as is.

NVIDIA and xrandr were detecting monitors correctly but DP wasn't getting signal.

Removing my try-hard /etc/X11/xorg.conf, deleting xfce4's display config at ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/displays.xml and resetting .xinitrc to this worked:

# xrandr --output "HDMI-0" --mode "$MODE" --output "DP-0" --mode "$MODE" &
xrandr --setprovideroutputsource modesetting NVIDIA-0
xrandr --auto

notes

obs-linuxbrowser-bin also must be installed with dependencies from aur gconf and ceph-minimal (see package)
cannot build the aur version of docker, docker-git, due to broken/unmaintained package and/or docker project being move to moby/moby repo

problem with AMD Ryzen CPU

PC will "randomly" freeze, screen on, but mouse and keyboard input will not work.

Helpful wiki post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=245608

Gentoo Wiki: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Ryzen#Random_reboots_with_mce_events

Updating kernel params with GRUB boot loader: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/kernel_parameters#GRUB

sudo vim /etc/default/grub

# add parameters to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="processor.max_cstate=5 rcu_nocbs=0-11"

# regenerate `grub.cfg`
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg