Arch Linux is not hard to install, by the way

Published Sep 9, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day. He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice. When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles. Have you ever wondered why Arch Linux users can’t stop mentioning that they use Arch, by the way? Did you want to try Arch Linux yourself, but then saw the technically demanding installation process and told yourself, “Oh, that’s why”? Well, I’m happy to tell you that Arch Linux is no longer as hard to install as it used to be — and hasn’t been for some time now. Even if you don’t come from a technical background, you can install and set up Arch in an afternoon. What made Arch Linux difficult to install Where did the reputation come from Linux in general has always had a reputation for being technically demanding. Even the simplest distributions, be it Ubuntu or Linux Mint, can intimidate some Windows users simply because the platform is unfamiliar. But at least those distributions offer you a graphical interface to install and manage the operating system. With Arch Linux, it just drops you into a terminal interface. You have no buttons to click or instructions telling you what to do next. You have to type specific commands, in the right sequence, to partition your disk, install the base system, install a desktop environment, configure everything, and only then do you get something usable. It can feel less like installing an OS and more like building a DIY project. Granted, Arch isn’t like this just for the sake of being hard. By giving you a very minimal base, it gives you full control over every component that makes up your operating system. It’s probably the purest form of building a personal computer. However, in order to capitalize on this level of control, you need to know what’s going on under the hood of your OS and actually have opinions about it so you can pick the right pieces. It’s this technical know-how that makes Arch Linux hard. Installing the OS is almost analogous to building the OS, and that’s what gave it its reputation. The archinstall script makes installation much easier The official shortcut most people still don't know exists Credit: Dave McKay / How-To Geek While entering a series of terminal commands in the right sequence is still the default way to install Arch, it’s not the only way. For the past several years, Arch has shipped with an official guided installer called archinstall. Granted, it doesn’t free you from the terminal, but it does give you a text-based menu interface that you can navigate with your arrow keys. This way, you’re at least not stuck typing commands all the time. You can dig into the options that matter to you and quickly pick what you want, and for everything else — the stuff you don't care about or don't know about — you can just keep the defaults. It comes with sensible defaults out of the box, which streamlines much of the research work. And because you're selecting from menus rather than typing commands, there are no typos or syntax mistakes to worry about. Simply browse the categories, make your picks, hit install, and you're done. That said, I still think you should have some idea or opinion about how you want to build your operating system. At the end of the day, Arch Linux is about building a highly personalized computer specific to your needs and requirements. If you don’t have any such specific requirements or opinions, it really doesn’t make sense to use vanilla Arch. If you want a walkthrough before trying it, Linux YouTuber Brodie Robertson has a roughly 30-minute video covering the archinstall script. It’s honestly all the research you’ll need to use the tool properly. LLMs can parse the Arch Wiki for you What if you got an assistant to help you install Arch Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | New Africa/Shutterstock While the archinstall script streamlines the installation process, it doesn’t expose every single option or the sheer flexibility you get when installing Arch Linux the traditional way. This matters if you actually want to get into the technical nitty-gritty and build the truly personal operating system that Arch promises. Well, doing that is now easier than it used to be thanks to modern LLM chatbots like Claude or ChatGPT. Linux is open source, the Arch Wiki is public, and these models have been trained on vast amounts of text about these technologies, making them intimately familiar with how Linux works. And yes, sure, there's always some probability of hallucination, but that rarely happens with the current generation of models — if you're using Claude Opus 5 or ChatGPT with GPT-5.6 Luna or Terra, you're rarely going to see any. What this means is that you can confidently take the traditional route to installing Arch, open Claude (or your favorite chatbot), and potentially turn it into an interactive session. Simply tell the chatbot how you want the system to work, share what’s happening on your screen, and ask it what to do next. It'll give you the specific commands to enter and even explain all the options to you in a non-technical manner. You can even ask it to use analogies tailored to your technical background — whether you're coming from Windows or macOS — so you can make the best decisions to build your own personalized Arch system. You don't have to install vanilla Arch Get what you actually came for — without the setup Finally, there’s the fact that you don’t necessarily have to install vanilla Arch to use it. Building a hyper-personalized system is only one benefit of using Arch Linux. In fact, many people want to use Arch because it follows a rolling-release model, where you get package updates as soon as developers ship them. Others use it for access to the AUR — one of the largest software repositories in the Linux world, where you can find almost any software you’d want. Both of those can be really attractive reasons to use Arch Linux on their own. And if that's the case for you, you don’t necessarily have to install vanilla Arch — you can install one of the many Arch-based distributions that make the experience easier. So let’s say you want a minimal system like vanilla Arch promises, but want to skip the technical installation process and replace it with something more graphical and streamlined. In that case, you can go with EndeavourOS. Alternatively, let’s say you want to use Arch Linux because you want to stay on the bleeding edge, get quick access to gaming software, and get the most performance out of your system. CachyOS is purpose-built for that demographic. Or maybe you want to build one of those aesthetic-looking setups you see all over the internet, with auto-tiling windows, stylized interface elements, and transparency effects. Omarchy fits that description perfectly. Yes, by using one of these Arch derivatives, you’re forsaking the ability to build a hyper-personalized system. But then again, it’s also worth asking whether you actually need to. Most of our use cases fall into a few big silos anyway, and there are already dozens of Arch-based distributions that cater to these workflows. You can just pick one of them and start using it.