Actually just last night I dipped into a vanilla Arch install on an old laptop. The wiki is pretty good, but I feel it skirts over some things that true beginners don’t know. I misread a line when seeing my efi partitions, which caused a cascade of issues that took some fixing. Then it took me a while to get a numlock hook set, mainly because I was trying to build a package as root, which again led to other issues with access rights. And I finally got microcode added to my boot file, which took an embarrassingly long amount of time, because I didn’t see the line that says I can’t update efistub, I have to replace it to add options.

All of that said, the process has definitely forced me to learn a lot of things I didn’t know, and I already feel a bit more comfortable rooting around the system with confidence I can fix my problems. I’m ready to install a DE, so I need to do a little reading on some of those. It’s been already been quite a journey, and I know I’ve barely scratched the surface.

As someone who’s seeing a lot of this for the first time, I think the toughest part is understanding the jargon. The tutorial will reference some file, or the kernel, or things in the bootloader and ramdisk, but without any prior knowledge of most of those, it’s like reading a foreign language. Seeing the big picture of how things jive together so that the small things make sense is a rabbit hole of pages that are easy to get lost in.