I use Arch, btw (yes, on the Framework)

I’ve been happily running Fedora 42 on my Framework laptop for a couple of weeks, but I recently got that itch that every Linux user gets (it’s always distro-hopping time). Somewhere on the internet I’d seen the Caelestia dotfiles, and spun up an Arch Linux VM with the config applied - I was blown away. It looked incredible, and I almost immediately knew I had to have it running on bare metal. This sparked an amazing project that I could distract myself from university assignments with - dual-booting Arch alongside my existing Fedora install. And because I love taking risks, I decided I also wanted a shared data partition so I could share ~/Documents (and importantly steamapps) between the two systems.

I knew this would mean partitioning my main NVMe drive - so I dutifully ignored all the massive red warning boxes in every tutorial telling me how dangerous this was when it was the only place I had a running linux system. While I could have easily wiped my drive and started fresh, my goal was to perform this surgery without losing my stable Fedora install. I’d heard all about how unstable Arch Linux was, and I ideally wanted to have some system alive and ready to run in case I needed to do, you know, things like Bluetooth, Wifi, use my microphone, external displays, that sort of thing.

The Partitioning Surgery

My first move was to try and partition from within Fedora. This was a non-starter; you can’t resize the foundation while you’re standing in the house. The solution was booting from a dedicated GParted Live USB to perform the operation from a neutral environment.

I shrank my main btrfs partition and created two new ones:

1. An ext4 partition for the Arch root (/).
2. An ntfs partition for my shared /data drive. (Pro-tip - using ntfs is a life-saver, as it avoids all the Linux uid/gid permission headaches between two different distros).

Let’s use archinstall, right?

With my partitions ready, I booted from my Arch Live USB. My secret weapon, I thought, would be the archinstall script I’d seen on YouTube. I’ve used Linux before but I was doing this in my spare time and I didn’t want to spend hours setting up arch. This script was supposed to automate the whole process.

I ran archinstall, selected ‘Manual partitioning’ (so it didn’t overwrite my entire Fedora install) and pointed it at the new partitions I’d just made earlier:

• /dev/nmve0n1p5 (my ext4 partition) - mount point /
• /dev/nvme0n1p1 (my existing EFI partition) - mount point /boot/efi

I hit install, and … ValueError: mount point is not specified

I went back and did it all again. From the beginning. Fresh Arch install, archinstall, iterate through. Same error. I dug deeper. I googled a lot. I made sure my EFI partition was marked with the Esp. I googled even more. The archinstall script, it turns out, is fantastic for clean installs, but gets very confused when I try to manually partition my drives. While great for clean installs, gets very confused by existing multi-boot setups. Fedora also often maps multiple subvolumes together nowadays, in a way that makes discovery tricky. It was time to do it the real Arch way.

The Real Arch Way™

I had to abandon the script and go manual. Time to pull up the Arch Wiki.

• mount /dev/nvme0n1p5 /mnt
• mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi && mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot/efi to mount my partitioned drives
• pacstrap /mnt base linux... to install the core system.
• genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab to set up the partitions.
• arch-chroot /mnt to go “inside” my new system.

Now I was inside the system. I created my user accounts, set my locale, my passwords, all of that. Now just the bootloader so the next time I logged in it doesn’t just explode my entire system…

GRUB

I first ran grub-install - efibootmgr not found. A quick pacman -S efibootmgr fixed that, but it was a sign of what was to come.

I had decided to keep GRUB for its os-prober feature, as I was led to believe this would automatically find my Fedora installation. No such luck, unfortunately.

• grub-mkconfig failed: os-prober ran but found… nothing. It turns out, I’m not smart enough to figure out how to get os-prober to scan Fedora’s btrfs subvolumes, even with btrfs-progs installed. I’m still not 100% sure if I had something misconfigured, but I pushed forward anyway.

The solution was to stop relying on automation and write a manual chainloader. My first attempt failed, but the final, working solution was adding this to /etc/grub.d/40_custom:

menuentry "Fedora" {
    search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root YOU-DONT-NEED-MY-UUID
    chainloader /EFI/fedora/grubx64.efi
}

I rebooted my laptop, and the beautiful GRUB menu appeared. I could boot into Arch. Wonderful.

Shared partition

I rebooted again, this time into Fedora.

sudo mkdir /data, sudo nano /etc/fstab - I added the magic line for my ntfs drive, gave myself ownership of it. I tried to move some of my documents into /data. Permission denied.

My old nemesis. I ran findmnt /data and saw the problem - my root drive hadn’t mounted at all. I looked back at my fstab - a lovely little typo, ntfs instead of ntfs-3g. I fixed it, ran sudo mount -a and tried again. This time, it worked! I moved all of my documents, game saves, pictures, all that fun stuff, into my data drive, and then scribbled down a little list of software I would need to reinstall on Arch (raw image viewers, VS code, browsers, PDF viewers, Discord, Spotify, I could go on).

Caelestia

I cannot thank the team behind the caelestia dotfiles enough. The Hyprland config, along with the Quickshell config, makes this the prettiest operating system I’ve ever used, with almost no competition.

After less than an hour of installing fish and all the pre-requisite packages, running the installation scripts, erroring, debugging, rebooting, and tweaking Hyprland config, I was satisfied.

Look at this. Could you ever go back?

Final thoughts

One of the most surprising things I experienced was when I plugged my laptop into my HDMI cable, fully expecting absolutely nothing to happen, the display to tear, or some horrendously scaled image to appear - only for a beautifully intact, perfectly scaled monitor to materialise in front of my eyes. It actually worked better on Hyprland / Arch than it did on Fedora with GNOME. There’s no going back now.

Yes, it does get a bit tiring connecting to WiFi and Bluetooth devices with my terminal using nmcli dev wifi connect "eduroam" and bluetootctl devices (and yes, I know there are GUI tools for that, but my terminal is too beautiful to not use) and it’s probably good practice for me to understand more about the operating system anyway - for when it inevitably breaks and I need to fix it on the fly.

Most importantly, I can now, finally, say:

“I use Arch, btw”.

Happy days.