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Arch Linux Installation Guide

Guide to install Arch Linux on an EFI System. Includes these features:

Full Disk Encryption with LUKS
BTRFS with @ and @home subvolumes
Timeshift Backups
Encrypted Swap Partition
rEFInd bootloader
SDDM display manager
KDE Plasma desktop environment

DISCLAIMER

I am not responsible for any damages, loss of data, system corruption, or any other mishap you may somehow cause by following this guide.

This is mainly a step-by-step reminder/log for myself of how I installed Arch on my laptop. I am putting this out there in case it is useful for someone else, it is not intended to be an official guide. As a result, you may find that this guide is very tedious or lists a lot of unnecessary/intuitive steps or just straight up does things in a way that is considered bad practice. Apart from the latter, this is intentional, as I did not find these steps intuitive at all when

Arch Linux Installation

LVM on LUKS Arch installation with systemd-boot

Sources:

Note: If you want a simpler encryption setup (with LUKS only), you can instead use the archinstall "guided" installer included with Arch since April 2021.

Nix String and Path Concatenation

From Bas van Dijk:

To understand these things I would recommend using nix-repl:

$ nix-repl
Welcome to Nix version 1.11.2. Type :? for help.

	{
	inputs = {
	flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
	naersk.url = "github:nix-community/naersk";
	rust-overlay.url = "github:oxalica/rust-overlay";
	nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable";
	};

	outputs = { self, flake-utils, naersk, nixpkgs, rust-overlay }:
	flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system: