this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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The only reason I went with manjaro this last time is because I had my arch Linux install adventure already and I just wanted my computer to work. is there an install script that just works now?
There is archinstall which does everything for you. If you don't wanna do anything yourself though, just check out CachyOS or EndeavourOS
I just switched from Bazzite to Cachy today. For some reason my disk space got... clogged, with Bazzite? Filelight was no help so I backed everything up, wiped the disk, installed Cachy, replaced my files, and the disk went from being nearly full to only using 600GB. Still not sure what happened there.
Cachy, meanwhile, has asked me to update 4 times in the 4 hours I've been using it. Which is fine, I get that Arch is rolling release, but now on the 4th update it keep failing for some reason. Also I can't have my headphones and speakers plugged in at the same time or my speakers don't work.
Sigh. All this KDE stuff is nice and flashy, and my games have worked with both Bazzite and Cachy, so I appreciate that, but damn is it tough for me to make a Linux recommendation to anyone else that isn't just "use Mint, it's stable." Anything more in depth turns into a mini essay (see above!)
you dont need to update every time an update is available.
just update once every couple weeks
I know, I just like to see the "up to date" symbol in the toolbar, especially on a fresh install. Like I said, I get that it's rolling release; the problem isn't the frequency of updates, it's that this most recent update keeps failing when I try to install it.
I just have a small counter on my Polybar checking how many packages can be updated. Once it reaches a few hundred, I upgrade.
maybe try refreshing the keyrings first.
sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring
Running an Arch based distro comes with a commitment to learning "the Arch way". You need to be willing to look at the terminal output of pacman and see what the errors mean. Being close to bleeding edge means that on occasion something will fail or end up in a state that you need to resolve. Its usually easy, but you need to pay attention to what pacman is telling you. If that isn't something someone is interested in there are plenty of other excellent distros out there that will meet their needs.
You probably had snapper making tons of backups. You can open up btrfs assistant and delete some old snapper backups to make room.
Set up the snapper-timeline.timer and set snapshots to only snap on update/remove of packages with snap-pac. Also from the arch wiki,
Is there a distro that sets this up well by default?
Garuda Linux -> https://garudalinux.org/
Just checked the fstab on my tablet and they have subvolumes for root, home, srv, cache, log and tmp. I also have snap-pac installed and not sure if it's installed by default but I assume it is. Their KDE is awesome! Very polished. They have really taken the time to make arch easy.
They have all sorts of aliases in the .bashrc that are there to make transitioning to arch a little less daunting to the average user. Things like reflector to stay current with mirrorlists.
The have warnings when something is wrong during updates with instructions how to fix, taking care of conflicts during updates, fixing pacman lock,
garuda-update remote fixto restore pacman to their default's. Chaotic AUR might be installed by default, not sure it's been a long while since I installed. Great setup assistant, and installer. btrfs-assistant and eza setup. Might want to install and set up meld to handle pacdiff in the .bashrcalias pacdiff="sudo -H DIFFPROG=meld pacdiff"If you want easyarch Garuda is it. If you want a real arch experience without having to go through the manual install process, endeavour or archinstall is the way to go. You might have to setup btrfs and snapper the way you want it manually though. Im not sure about endeavour as I haven't used it in a while. It's pretty easy to do though.
The tool
gduis very nice for finding space culprits.Never used Bazzite, but isn't it heavy on packaged apps with snap or flatpak? Inherently space inefficient (and I despise them both passionately).
Don't update all the time. I update every couple of days like a maniac, but once every few weeks is fine too.
There's a distro for every level of "I want to do it myself" vs "I want everything to be made ready for me".
It's flatpak. Not snap, by god, not snap.
It's inefficient, but he is stating that he is now using "only 600GB", so I would guess it shouldn't be that notable to someone who thinks 600GB is not much.
I used to dislike it, but consider that Flatpak is allowing a lot of small distros to exist outside of Debian/RHEL/Arch. Void, Chimera, Adélie or Guix (insert yours here) "only" have to implement a desktop environment and Flatpak to be usable. It's not ideal and it kind of goes against the point of those distros, but they definitely couldn't package Flathub's 3300 apps themselves. Especially the proprietary ones that only provide a .deb and .rpm.
Also the sandboxing is nice when installing proprietary stuff. I don't want Microsoft Team drooling all over my stuff.
du -sh * | sort -h
That's how I usually try to figure it out
EndeavourOS is very close to being vanilla arch with sane defaults. I run it on multiple machines and it's rock solid.
I’ve used Archinstall without issue a couple times now. I get why it might not fit every use case or seem as intuitive to others as it does to me but I’ve enjoyed using it.
I tried to use Archinstall but I was installing on a partition on a secondary drive and I couldn't get it to go in the right place so I just did it the long way. It's really not that hard but I can see how it's a bit daunting if you've never done it before. Archinstall seems like it would be good if you where installing it as the main os.
ArchInstall seems to offer or install stuff that may be confusing for a new user though, such as installing the OS on LVM, enabling zram, zero swap allocated, etc
If I bothered to do it all over again, I'd likely go with manual install instead of ArchInstall.
yeah something like this is what I'm talking about. when I set up my laptop I followed a Reddit post by someone who had the same model. it wasn't difficult by any means but it took a while to get everything configured.
Manjaro comes with a shitload of stuff that I don't need and I end up ripping out a lot of it and disabling services
In addition to what has been mentioned already, Garuda is an Arch derivative where convenience is the whole point. No install scripts, just your usual live ISO with a Calamares installer plus a bunch of convenience utilities once you're set up.
It's not exactly lightweight by default but it does make for a very comfortable Arch experience.
Garuda was actually my first distro. Smooth as butter lol I still remember thinking why are there 3 different version.