General recommendations

Related articles
Frequently asked questions
List of applications
System maintenance
This document is an annotated index of popular articles and important information for improving and adding functionalities to the installed Arch system. Readers are assumed to have read and followed the
Installation guide
to obtain a basic Arch Linux installation. Having read and understood the concepts explained in
#System administration
and
#Package management
is
required
for following the other sections of this page and the other articles in the wiki.
System administration
This section deals with administrative tasks and system management. See
Core utilities
and
Category:System administration
for more.
Users and groups
A new installation leaves you with only the
superuser
account, better known as "root". Logging in as root for prolonged periods of time, possibly even exposing it via
SSH
on a server,
is insecure
. Instead, you should create and use unprivileged user account(s) for most tasks, only using the root account for system administration. See
Users and groups#User management
for details.
Users and groups are a mechanism for
access control
; administrators may fine-tune group membership and ownership to grant or deny users and services access to system resources. Read the
Users and groups
article for details and potential security risks.
Security
Read
Security
for recommendations and best practices on hardening the system.
For a list of applications to allow running commands or starting an interactive shell as another user (e.g. root), see
List of applications/Security#Privilege elevation
. For graphical equivalents (and how to avoid them), see
Privilege elevation for graphical applications
.
Tip
More fine-grained privilege elevation is provided by
polkit
, which requires additional setup for graphical environments.
Service management
Arch Linux uses
systemd
as the
init
process, which is a system and service manager for Linux. For maintaining your Arch Linux installation, it is a good idea to learn the basics about it.
Interaction with
systemd
is done through the
systemctl
command. See
systemd#Basic systemctl usage
for more information.
A logging system is also provided, with the command
journalctl
. See
journal
for more information.
System maintenance
Arch is a rolling release system and has rapid package turnover, so users have to take some time to do
system maintenance
.
Package management
This section contains helpful information related to package management. See
FAQ#Package management
and
Category:Package management
for more.
Note
It is imperative to keep up to date with changes in Arch Linux that require manual intervention
before
upgrading your system. Subscribe to the
arch-announce mailing list
or the
recent news RSS feed
. Alternatively, check the front page
Arch news
every time before you update.
pacman
pacman
is the Arch Linux
pac
kage
man
ager: it is highly encouraged to become familiar with it before reading any other articles.
For long term handling of cached packages, see
pacman#Cleaning the package cache
.
See
pacman/Tips and tricks
for suggestions on how to improve your interaction with
pacman
and package management in general.
Repositories
See the
Official repositories
article for details about the purpose of each officially maintained repository.
If you plan on using 32-bit applications, you will want to enable the
multilib
repository.
The
Unofficial user repositories
article lists several other unsupported repositories.
You may consider installing the
pkgstats
service.
Mirrors
Visit the
Mirrors
article for steps on taking full advantage of using the fastest and most up to date mirrors of the official repositories. As explained in the article, a particularly good advice is to routinely check the
Mirror Status
page for a list of mirrors that have been recently synced. This can be automated with
Reflector
.
Arch Build System
Ports
is a system initially used by BSD distributions consisting of build scripts that reside in a directory tree on the local system. Simply put, each port contains a script within a directory intuitively named after the installable third-party application.
The
Arch build system
offers the same functionality by providing build scripts called
PKGBUILDs
, which are populated with information for a given piece of software: integrity hashes, project URL, version, license and build instructions. These PKGBUILDs are parsed by
makepkg
, the actual program that generates packages that are cleanly manageable by
pacman
.
Every package in the repositories along with those present in the AUR are subject to recompilation with
makepkg
.
Arch User Repository
While the Arch Build System allows the ability of building software available in the official repositories, the
Arch User Repository
(AUR) is the equivalent for user submitted packages. It is an unsupported repository of build scripts accessible through the
web interface
or through the
Aurweb RPC interface
.
Booting
This section contains information pertaining to the boot process. An overview of the Arch boot process can be found at
Arch boot process
. See
Category:Boot process
for more.
Hardware auto-recognition
Hardware should be auto-detected by
udev
during the boot process by default. A potential improvement in boot time can be achieved by disabling module auto-loading and specifying required modules manually, as described in
Kernel modules
. Additionally,
Xorg
should be able to auto-detect required drivers using
udev
, but users have the option to configure the X server manually too.
Microcode
Processors may have
faulty behaviour
, which the kernel can correct by updating the
microcode
on startup. See
Microcode
for details.
Retaining boot messages
Once the login prompt appears, the messages from boot are cleared, leaving users unable to gather feedback from them.
Disable clearing of boot messages
to overcome this limitation.
Num Lock activation
Num Lock
is a toggle key found in most keyboards. For activating Num Lock's number key-assignment during startup, see
Activating numlock on bootup
.
Graphical user interface
This section provides orientation for users wishing to run graphical applications on their system. See
Category:Graphical user interfaces
for additional resources.
Xorg DDX drivers
Xorg
's default
modesetting
DDX driver will work with most video cards, but performance may be improved and additional features harnessed by installing the
appropriate DDX driver
for
AMD
,
Intel
or
NVIDIA
products.
Desktop environments
Although the display server provides the basic framework for building a graphical environment, additional components may be considered necessary for a complete user experience.
Desktop environments
such as
KDE
,
GNOME
,
COSMIC
,
Xfce
,
Cinnamon
,
LXDE
, bundle together a wide range of well-integrated applications, such as a window manager or compositor, panel/taskbar, file manager, terminal emulator, text editor, icons, and other utilities. Users with less experience may wish to install a desktop environment for a more familiar environment. See
Category:Desktop environments
for additional resources.
Window managers or compositors
A full-fledged desktop environment provides a complete and consistent graphical user interface, but tends to consume a good amount of system resources. Users seeking to maximize performance or otherwise simplify their environment may opt to install a
window manager
or
compositor
alone and hand-pick desired extras. Using
Xorg
, most desktop environments allow use of an alternative window manager as well.
Dynamic
,
stacking
, and
tiling
window managers differ in their handling of window placement.
Display manager
Most desktop environments include a
display manager
for automatically starting the graphical environment and managing user logins. Users without a desktop environment can install one separately. Alternatively you may
start X at login
as a simple alternative to a display manager.
User directories
Well-known user directories like Downloads or Music are created by the
xdg-user-dirs-update.service
user service, that is provided by
xdg-user-dirs
and enabled by default upon install. If your desktop environment or window manager does not pull in the package, you can
install
it and run
xdg-user-dirs-update
manually as per
XDG user directories#Creating default directories
.
Power management
This section may be of use to laptop owners or users otherwise seeking power management controls. See
Category:Power management
for more.
See
Power management
for more general overview.
ACPI events
Users can configure how the system reacts to ACPI events such as pressing the power button or closing a laptop's lid. For the recommended method using
systemd
, see
Power management#ACPI events
. For the old method, see
acpid
.
CPU frequency scaling
Modern processors can decrease their frequency and voltage to reduce heat and power consumption. Less heat leads to more quiet system and prolongs the life of hardware. See
CPU frequency scaling
for details.
Laptops
For articles related to portable computing along with model-specific installation guides, please see
Category:Laptops
. For a general overview of laptop-related articles and recommendations, see
Laptop
.
Suspend and hibernate
See the main article:
Power management/Suspend and hibernate
.
Multimedia
Category:Multimedia
includes additional resources.
Sound system
ALSA
is a kernel
sound system
that should work out the box (it just needs to be
unmuted
).
Sound servers
such as
PipeWire
and
PulseAudio
can offer additional features and support more complex audio configuration.
See
Professional audio
for advanced audio requirements.
Networking
This section is confined to small networking procedures. See
Network configuration
for a full configuration guide and
Category:Networking
for related articles.
DNS security
For better security while browsing the web, paying online, connecting to
SSH
services and similar tasks consider using
DNSSEC
-enabled
DNS resolver
that can validate signed
DNS
records, and an encrypted protocol such as
DNS over TLS
,
DNS over HTTPS
or
DNSCrypt
. See
Domain name resolution
for details.
Setting up a firewall
A firewall can provide an extra layer of protection on top of the Linux networking stack. While the stock Arch kernel is capable of using
Netfilter
's
iptables
and
nftables
, neither are enabled by default. It is highly recommended to set up some form of firewall. See
Category:Firewalls
for available guides.
Network shares
To share files among the machines in a network, follow the
NFS
or the
SSHFS
article.
Use
Samba
to join a Windows network. To configure the machine to use Active Directory for authentication, read
Active Directory integration
.
See also
Category:Network sharing
.
Input devices
This section contains popular input device configuration tips. See
Category:Input devices
for more.
Keyboard layouts
Non-English or otherwise non-standard keyboards may not function as expected by default. The necessary steps to configure the keymap are different for virtual console and
Xorg
, they are described in
Keyboard configuration in console
and
Keyboard configuration in Xorg
respectively.
Mouse buttons
Owners of advanced or unusual mice may find that not all mouse buttons are recognized by default, or may wish to assign different actions for extra buttons. Instructions can be found in
Mouse buttons
.
Laptop touchpads
Many laptops use
Synaptics
or
ALPS
"touchpad" pointing devices. For these, and several other touchpad models, you can use either the Synaptics input driver or libinput; see
Touchpad Synaptics
and
libinput
for installation and configuration details.
TrackPoints
See the
TrackPoint
article to configure your TrackPoint device.
Optimization
This section aims to summarize tweaks, tools and available options useful to improve system and application performance.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking
is the act of measuring performance and comparing the results to another system's results or a widely accepted standard through a unified procedure.
Improving performance
The
Improving performance
article gathers information and is a basic rundown about gaining performance in Arch Linux.
Solid state drives
The
Solid state drive
article covers many aspects of solid state drives, including configuring them to maximize their lifetimes, e.g. with
TRIM
.
System services
This section relates to
daemons
.
File index and search
Most distributions have a
locate
command available to be able to quickly search files. Arch Linux provides several alternatives, see
locate
for details.
Desktop search engines
provide a similar service, while better integrated into
desktop environments
.
Local mail delivery
A default setup does not provide a way to synchronize mail. A list of mail delivery agents is available in the
Mail server
article.
Printing
CUPS
is a standards-based, open source printing system developed by OpenPrinting for Linux. See
Category:Printers
for printer-specific articles.
Appearance
This section contains frequently-sought "eye candy" tweaks for an aesthetically pleasing Arch experience. See
Category:Eye candy
for more.
Fonts
You may wish to install a set of TrueType fonts, as only unscalable bitmap fonts are included in a basic Arch system. There are several general-purpose
font families
providing large
Unicode
coverage and even
metric compatibility
with fonts from other operating systems.
A plethora of information on the subject can be found in the
Fonts
and
Font configuration
articles.
If spending a significant amount of time working from the virtual console (i.e. outside an X server), users may wish to change the console font to improve readability; see
Linux console#Fonts
.
GTK and Qt themes
A big part of the applications with a graphical interface for Linux systems are based on the
GTK
or the
Qt
toolkits. See those articles and
Uniform look for Qt and GTK applications
for ideas to improve the appearance of your installed programs and adapt it to your liking.
Console improvements
This section applies to small modifications that improve console programs' practicality. See
Category:Command-line shells
for more.
Tab-completion enhancements
It is recommended to properly set up extended
tab completion
right away, as instructed in the article of your chosen
shell
.
Aliases
Aliasing a command, or a group thereof, is a way of saving time when using the console. This is especially helpful for repetitive tasks that do not need significant alteration to their parameters between executions. Common time-saving aliases can be found in
Bash#Aliases
, which are easily portable to
zsh
as well.
Alternative shells
Bash
is the shell installed by default in an Arch system. The live installation media, however, uses
zsh
with the
grml-zsh-config
addon package. See
Command-line shell#List of shells
for more alternatives.
Bash additions
A list of miscellaneous Bash settings, history search and
Readline
macros is available in
Bash#Tips and tricks
.
Colored output
This section is covered in
Color output in console
.
Compressed files
Compressed files, or archives, are frequently encountered on a GNU/Linux system.
Tar
is one of the most commonly used archiving tools, and users should be familiar with its syntax (Arch Linux packages, for example, are simply
zstd
compressed tarballs). See
Archiving and compression
.
Console prompt
The console prompt (
PS1
) can be customized to a great extent. See
Bash/Prompt customization
or
Zsh#Prompts
if using Bash or Zsh, respectively.
Emacs shell
Emacs is known for featuring options beyond the duties of regular text editing, one of these being a full shell replacement. Consult
Emacs#Colored output issues
for a fix regarding garbled characters that may result from enabling colored output.
Mouse support
Using a mouse with the console for copy-paste operations can be preferred over
GNU Screen
's traditional copy mode. Refer to
General purpose mouse
for comprehensive directions. Note that you can already do this in
terminal emulators
with the
clipboard
.
Session management
Using terminal multiplexers like
tmux
or
GNU Screen
, programs may be run under sessions composed of tabs and panes that can be detached at will, so when the user either kills the terminal emulator, terminates
X
, or logs off, the programs associated with the session will continue to run in the background as long as the terminal multiplexer server is active. Interacting with the programs requires reattaching to the session.