48 LXF249May 2019 4446May 201978617
in-depth Arch Linux
One of the most exciting features in Kernel 5.0 is
AMD’s FreeSync, which enables variable refresh rates
on suitably expensive GPUs and displays. If you are
lucky enough to have such technologies, Arch Linux is
a great place to test them out. You won’t need to mess
around with patching kernels, PPAs or custom Mesa
builds to get everything working – everything’s already
in the repos, awaiting your download.
Assuming you’ve already got a working desktop with
the xf86-video-amdgpu driver installed, you’re halfway
there. We just need a minimal xorg.conf snippet which
frobs the required option. So create /etc/X11/xorg.
conf.d/20-amdgpu-freesync.conf and fill it with:
Section “Device”
Identifier “AMD RX590”
Driver “amdgpu”
Option “DRI” “3”
Option “VariableRefresh” “true”
EndSection
It’s early days for FreeSync on Linux; at the time of
writing, the feature is disabled for browsers, video
players and desktop compositors. Still, Linux gamers
are reporting FreeSync success for OpenGL games.You can achieve a lot from the terminal, but many
users will be desirous of installing some sort of desktop
environment. One of the main draws of Arch Linux is
access to the latest Gnome/KDE/Cinnamon/<insert
your favourite DE here> goodness. What is less known
is that Arch provides opportunities to customise the
software selections of most of these. If you’ve done a
little distro-hopping, you’ll have some idea of the
different ways that things can be arranged in GNOME
and KDE Plasma (and Xfce, MATE, and all the others).
You’ll likely also be aware of the applications bundled
with each desktop, and may have been frustrated when
trying to trim this down. Ubuntu has done quite well at
providing a good but not excessive selection of GNOME
applications. But if you naively try to remove Evolution
(or anything related to it), watch Apt threaten to tear
your system asunder.
In Arch, the base GNOME desktop and the core
applications are encompassed by the gnome package
group. Another group, gnome-extra, includes extra
games and utilities. Entering pacman -S gnome will
offer to install the 65-package entirety of the core
group, which you can do by just pressing Return.
Alternatively you can slim down the selection – for
instance, you may not be interested in GNOME Maps/
Music/Photos/Todo, or you may not like Tracker
indexing all your files.
The previous command shows each package with a
number next to it, and you can enter a space-separated
list of these numbers, and/or ranges, to pare things
back. If you’re not sure what a package is, query it with
pacman -Si packagename. As in most other distros,
GNOME defaults to using Wayland where possible,
falling back to X if things go awry.
To boot to the graphical login screen enable the gdm
systemd service with:
# systemctl enable gdm
KDE doesn’t have its own login manager, though SDDM
(Simple Desktop Display Manager) is the de facto
choice. One consequence of forgetting this detail is that
it’s possible to install a myriad of KDE-related packages
and still not have anything like a functioning desktop,
since the display server (X.org or Wayland)
dependencies are only pulled in by the display manager.
So first install that with pacman -S sddm and enable
it with systemctl enable sddm. Like GNOME, KDE
Plasma – the proper name for the desktop produced
by the KDE community – can be installed as a package
group with pacman -S plasma. Alternatively, just
installing the plasma-desktop package provides a
foundation for a more minimal installation. Unlike
GNOME, KDE applications are entirely decoupled
from the desktop, so you’ll want to peruse the ‘kde-
applications’ group to see what you need. This group
has 161 packages in total, but if you just need a
terminal, file manager, photo/document viewers
and other basic utilities then start with:
# pacman -S konsole dolphin kate gwenview okular
ark kcalc
Alternatively, we can use metapackages. These
behave very much like groups, insofar as you can refer
to a bunch of packages by a single name, but they differ
in that they are dynamic. If someone on Team Arch
decides to add a package to the ‘plasma’ group, for
example, that package won’t magically appear onIt’StheLIttLe thIngS
It’s hard to overestimate all the fine-tuning that goes into Ubuntu,
Manjaro or any other desktop-centric distribution. Recreating some of
those tweaks in Arch is tricky, but some of them are small things that
make surprisingly big differences.
For example, your command line life will be markedly improved if
you install the bash-completion package, which provides tab
completion for most commands. Note that you get filename
completion in Bash as standard – this package intelligently completes
command options, which is tremendously useful if you’re delving into
unfamiliar systemd or Qemu incantations.
In our Arch-based distos roundup in LXF246, we found some great
features in Antergos, ArchLabs, KaOS, Netrunner Rolling and Manjaro.
Some of these would be hard to recreate from scratch, like ArchLabs’
stylish Openbox/Polybar/tint2 combo. But some are easy. If you
want the Octopi or Pamac graphical package managers, they’re
available straight from the AUR. Just follow our guide to setting that
up and then do pikaur -S octopi , for example.
If you like Antergos’ glorious Numix GTK theme, that can be yours
with pacman -S numix-gtk-theme. Powerline is a plug-in for Vim,
but it can also be used, as it is in KaOS, to jazz up your terminal.
Check out the wiki page at http://bit.ly/lxf249powerline for how.New versions of KDE Frameworks,
Applications and Plasma land in
Arch pretty swiftly.