Seven: Arch & Windows Dual Boot

A long time ago, I got a gaming PC for Christmas. At that time, the PC was pretty top- notch; now, not so much. A GTX 660TI graphics card, 8GB RAM, and an i5-3330; by today's standards, it's dated. However, it was sitting around collecting dust, so I decided to load Arch on it, so I can then say that I use arch, btw.

I booted up the PC and the performance wasn't really that bad. I made the partition for Arch and then the first problems started showing up. I had never dual booted before so I wasn't very sure how partitions actually even worked. When the partition didn't show on my BIOS, I tried to troubleshoot it, which obviously went nowhere. It was an empty partition. So, when I loaded up a USB with Arch and used the archinstall tool, I wasn't sure how to deal with the partitions (didn't know i needed a primary + logical partition, etc) so I just decided to wipe the machine and load only Arch, then dual boot Windows on it later. I eventually regretted this decision.

Archinstall works like a charm; I really like the tool. However, setting up WiFi after booting was not as fun. I had never used tools like wpa_supplicant before, so it was a big learning experience. Turned out to not be so bad. However, then I had to dual boot Windows onto it. The Arch wiki actually wasn't amazingly helpful for this; I made the partitions that it said to make (3 of them for varying parts of the Windows OS) but actually made them in the wrong place. Once I tried to fix everything I ended up wrecking my filesystem on accident, and had to use System Rescue to re-install Arch again because I'm dumb. I did the partitions the right way this time, (gdisk + gparted on the System Rescue USB to format the filesystems) and, to my great surprise, Windows booted up with no problems. It was a process that took me the course of two days on and off, and probably like 4-5 hours overall, but my eyes have been opened. I feel much more comfortable in an area that I had no knowledge in.

I really do see why people love Arch after playing around with it. Now that I have decent Linux experience, I was able to do some nice configuration. I currently am running LightDM + Sway + Kitty on the machine, and I will load zsh onto it as well soon. No need to play around with defaults that I don't care for (i.e. GNOME) or have bloat on my machine that I will never use (Kali, Ubuntu, ...). Also, the wiki is great, and most importantly, I have the freedom to say I use arch, btw.