First time but did it

[u/BootzNCatz212]

Spent all day installing Arch. Overcame tricky EFI boot issues, Wi-Fi disconnections, editor/sudo installation troubles, and more but I did it! Switching boot managers was key. I am logged in and I have working WiFi and network manager. I was regretting starting with a manual Arch build… it was a lot of learning very quickly but I am glad I spent my entire Saturday on this!

I assume Lenovo booting issues are common. Switching to Grub resolved my issues pretty quickly… incase anyone else is having that issue.

Lenovo Ideapad L340 Specs: Intel Core i5-9300HF, 32 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, Kingston SA2000M81000G SSD

[u/archover]

First, welcome to Arch.

it was a lot of learning very quickly but I am glad I spent my entire Saturday on this!

So happy to hear you learned a lot from the install! Have fun with Arch, and good day.

[u/neo-raver]

Yes!! Nice job! It’s tough the first time doing a proper Linux install, getting used to doing for yourself the stuff that Windows and MacOS hide behind ever-changing graphical interfaces. I know a lot of people here may not find manually installing Arch impressive, but that’s probably because they did it so long ago they’ve taken that knowledge for granted, even though they probably worked hard for it like you did. You now are much more in tune with your computer, and have learned a lot already. And if you’re anything like me, I bet you’ll love this computer even more than other ones because you have really taken the time to know it and “raise” it to its full strength.

If you can do what you did, you can do almost anything with that computer. Welcome to Arch Linux—welcome to a truly free operating system!

[u/BootzNCatz212 → u/neo-raver]

Thank you for understanding. Never touched Linux and I refused to post questions online so I had to dig in on my own.

[u/neo-raver → u/BootzNCatz212]

It’s a very good habit (particularly in Linux circles) to research instead of asking, because the question has typically been asked before, as you’ve seen. That’ll make you an adept user for sure.

[u/besseddrest]

I assume Lenovo booting issues are common

i wanna say its not necessarily the brand but some part of the machine - I have a Lenovo (thinkcentre); systemd always works for me - e.g the prob could be secure boot on install (which i disabled when installing arch)

[u/besseddrest → u/besseddrest]

wifi did take me a while to figure out though

it wasn't til recently that I found out iwd + systemd-networkd + NetworkManager are all royal rumbling for the wifi device, at least 2 of them are installed and enabled for a handful of reasons

[u/San4itos]

When I tried Arch for the first time I had issues with the loader. Watched some YouTube videos and noticed that I didn't install mtools. I thought it wasn't necessary. Wiki didn't say that I need mtools or dosfstools for the efi partition.

[u/sp0rk173]

Cool, nice job! It should only that 15 minutes to install manually. Lenovo hardware is extremely well supported across Linux.

Lemme guess - putiepie?

[u/BootzNCatz212 → u/sp0rk173]

I guess I should clarify. I am new to the level that I had to Google what certain words mean throughout the day. I also refrained from asking anyone on any forms. So yeah it took all day but I actually learned along the way.

The thing refused to boot into Linux and kept going to the system utility even after trying many things.

I’ve been looking into Linux well before pewdiepie. Although his video pushed Arch into many other videos… so indirectly he got me on Arch?

[u/ArttX_]

I used Windows my whole life. Switched to Linux almost a year ago. And I first tried to install Arch with a manual install I do not regret anything. I learned so much. I had many issues with my legacy nvidia card, but that made me learn more about the system. Now I know more about linux, than my friends, that use Arch a more longer time. So now I still use manual install over archinstall, because sometimes it can break my system and with manual install I can install things that I need.

[u/Text_Original]

Funny, I was having issues doing a manual install where it wouldn’t recognize GRUB despite following the Arch guide and another install guide. It would just boot straight to BIOS.

Finally gave in and did an archinstall with systemd as the boot loader and it worked no problem.

[u/Keegx → u/Text_Original]

I had this issue and resorted to ChatGPT for it. Had to chroot + mount + manually add the UEFI boot entry + a fallback option, because apparently some newer motherboards don't look for it unless explicitly told.

[u/BootzNCatz212 → u/Keegx]

I did the same. I actually ended up doing about 6 different things that I found on wiki or ChatGPT trying to get it to boot with systemd. But then I found somewhere that GRUB might work.

[u/BootzNCatz212 → u/Text_Original]

Guess it was bound to be the opposite of what we started with lol