When I was done installing Arch, all I had was a terminal. No desktop, no wallpaper, no icons, nothing. It wasn’t even a single window with a terminal. The computer was the terminal. That’s what I logged in to.
Turns out, there’s a lot to install just to get close to how things were back on macOS. But first, I was tired to googling for solutions on my phone, so I wanted to get an internet browser up and running on my desktop.
Installing firefox wasn’t enough. I also had to install a display server and a window manager—already two things I didn’t know I needed to have installed. I still don’t know what a display server does exactly. I think of it as the bridge between the terminal and graphical user interface (GUI). Apps like vim and emacs run in the terminal just fine, but to view photos or play videos, you would need a display manager. A window manager then manages how windows are places on-screen.
The actual installation process is very quick and easy, and I think that’s one of Arch’s best features. All you have to do is type
sudo pacman -S firefox xorg xorg-xinit awesome
into the terminal and hit enter. This installs
xorg-xinit),I actually unknowingly made the more difficult choice of xmonad as my first window manager, but that’s a story for another day. Let’s stick with Awesome for now.
Also, since I had an Intel CPU, I also added Intel’s video driver package:
sudo pacman -S xf86-video-intel
With that, I can now fire up my window manager atop a display server by first
creating a file ~/.xinitrc which contains a single line:
exec /usr/bin/awesome # launches awesome
and then running the command
startx
At this point, I have now progressed on to an actual desktop complete with a wallpaper, and by default I can press Cmd+p (Win+p for other PCs) to open Awesome’s built-in app launcher, from which I can type “firefox” and press enter to finally launch Firefox.
And that’s just Firefox. In this process, I already got to know that operating systems can be broken down to finer components than I previously thought possible. On one hand it’s daunting to have to install everything down to even the driver, but with it came a sense of peace—that nothing is installed on my device unless I want it to be.