This guide will cover one of the quickest and easiest ways of installing Arch Linux.
Most of the process is automated, but you will still need to be a bit tech savvy in order to understand the entire process and what each step does/offers.

Step 1: Spin Up a Virtual Machine and Mount the Arch Linux ISO

For demonstration purposes, we will go through the installation process on a Virtual Machine.
Before we proceed further, please note that this guide will not cover hypervisors and how to use them, as that is an entire topic in itself.
If you are new to virtualization, I would suggest first watching a video or two online to get the hang of it.

The latest Arch Linux ISOs can be found here.

After the VM boots up the ISO, you should see the following screen:

Select the first option to boot into the ISO CLI.

After it boots up, you should see the following screen:

Step 2: Check for Internet Access and Refresh the Package Repository

First off, we need to check if we have Internet access from our ISO CLI.
We can do that by simply pinging a public IP/domain:

After we have confirmed that we have Internet access, we should proceed and refresh the package repository by executing: pacman -Sy

Lastly, for this step, we will need to install the official Arch Linux GnuPG keys by executing:
archlinux-keyring

After we confirm the installation, the system will install the GnuPG keys used for verifying and validating packages distributed through Arch Linux’s official repositories. These keys are crucial for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of the software packages installed on Arch Linux systems.

Step 3: Configuring/Installing Arch Linux

Now comes the fun part! We are going to configure the system and install Arch Linux on the VM.
This part is usually what gives one the bragging rights of saying “I’m an Arch user”, but using the existing installation utility, we can “cheat” our way into the club.

Firstly, we need to enter the installation utility by executing: archinstall

Executing the command takes us directly to the installation utility. The options above are everything we need to configure in order to install Arch Linux (desktop environment included).

Some of the options will be left unchanged, we will just cover the most crucial ones.

We will start with the ‘Disk configuration’ option. Once selected you should see the following screen:

Here we will select the first option to make it as simple as possible.

After selecting it, we will be shown with a list of drives to select from.
The drive we select here will be formatted and the system installed on it:

The next screen will show a list of file systems we can choose from.
To keep it simple, and because we only have one drive in this example, we will continue with ext4:

Now, lets set the root password for the system:

This is pretty straight forward. When prompted, enter your desired password and confirm it:

To adhere to best practices, we will also create an user account and grant it sudo permissions:

When prompted, enter the user name and password:

When prompted to grant the user account sudo permissions, select ‘yes’.
Once we have done all that, we should see the following screen where we can confirm the setup:

Now we will proceed with the desktop environment by selecting the ‘Profile’ option:

To keep it user friendly and clean, we will go with GNOME.

Lastly, we will need to select the graphics driver. For this particular scenario, we will go with ‘VMware/VirtualBox (open-source)’:

Once done, select ‘Back’ to return to the main menu:

To wrap up the configuration, as you are likely familiar with how the installation utility works by now, set up the following options like this:
Audio – Pipewire,
Network configuration – NetworkManager,
Timezone – Select your own timezone.

This one is optional, but you can also select the ‘Additional packages’ option to, guess what, install additional packages. I have added some basic stuff that came to my mind, but you can add anything you desire/need:

The final step is to install the system:

The installation will take a few minutes, so you can go and take a quick break.
Once it has completed, you should see the following screen:

This is also optional. If you select ‘yes’ you will go straight to your newly installed system’s CLI in case you want to check, edit or install some things. We will go with ‘no’ as everything I mentioned can be done on the live system as well once booted up.

At this point, you should be brought back to the ISO CLI where we will proceed and shutdown the system to unmount the ISO from the VM and start our finished system afterwards.
To shutdown the system, execute: shutdown now

Step 4: Boot Up the System

Once you have unmounted the ISO and started the VM, you should be greeted with the following screen:

Congratulations, you are officially an Arch Linux user!
Now go ahead and log in with the user account we created earlier:

You will be surprised how quick the system is as there are no useless programs and bloatware most OSes ship with. That is one of the many benefits of building your own system from scratch.

Bonus Step

We cannot end this guide without pimping our terminal.
Since we have installed ‘neofetch’ and ‘lolcat’ through the ‘Additional packages’, we will add it in our shell configuration to show each time we open the terminal. While at it, we will also change the boring prompt as well.

To do so, open the ‘.bashrc’ file in your favorite text editor. The file is located in your user’s home directory.
Once opened, change the existing ‘PS1’ line to this:
PS1=’\[\033[01;33m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ ‘

After that, append the following lines to the bottom of the file:
clear -x
neofetch | lolcat

Lastly, save the changes and exit the text editor. To apply the changes, execute:
source .bashrc

If everything went well, you should be greeted with the following:

I hope you found this guide helpful. Feel free to leave a comment below with any questions.