Arch Linux – Very First Impressions

It’s been three days since I installed Arch, and I have to admit – I’m in love. I’ll go over my first impressions separately of;

1. The installation of Arch
2. Using Arch itself
3. The desktop environment I chose to install – Gnome

I think that’s only fair, as they’re fairly distinct things and I don’t want to conflate Gnome with Arch Linux.

The Arch Way – In The Beginning, There Was The Word

And the word was “pacman”. Specifically, it was “pacman -Syu” because I needed to update the live USB I was installing from.

Let me back up and start again.

I first installed Linux in April 2010, very shortly after Ubuntu released their 10.04 “Lucid Linux”. I was talking with a French backpacker on the Isle of Skye in Scotland about computers (as you do)  and he was saying he’d wanted to try Ubuntu – so it was set – we downloaded the .iso using the craptacular hostel internet, made a bootable thumb drive (not that I knew what one of those was at the time) and off we went!