Quick tips: Getting the most out of Arch (add yours)

[hydn (Hayden James)]

Arch is one of those distros where the more you put in, the more you get out.

I figured it’d be fun to start a thread where we can all share our favorite tips and tricks that make life on Arch a little smoother.

I’ll kick things off with a few:

• Always, always, read the Arch Wiki when troubleshooting. Seriously, it’s one of the best resources in all of Linux, not just Arch.
• Get comfortable with pacman’s query options. Things like pacman -Qdt to find orphaned packages or pacman -Qe to list explicitly installed packages.
• Set up a hook to clean your pacman cache automatically: paccache from pacman-contrib.
• Also see: Quick Tips for a more stable Arch Linux experience

What are your go-to Arch tips? Anything you wish you’d known sooner? Drop them below and let’s build a nice reference for everyone.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[toadie]

Use Pacman Hooks for automations.
Example GitHub - mrtoadie/archlinux-pacman: get more out of pacman · GitHub
Run a script every time you update Pacman to log your packages