Resetting Arch Linux

In this video I am going to show you how you can "reset" Arch Linux to the base system if your system becomes unstable, or you want to change DE or WM (although it's possible to have multiple DE's and WM's in one installation). I wanted to use my personal project on GitLab as it contains all the packages I usually install in the base. The only data I changed are the passwords, which were replaced with "new" ones.
Arch Wiki: wiki.archlinux...
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#LinuxMadeSimple #howto #reset

[@rohithrajesh1519]

I trust your videos so much that I don't even have to watch it completely before starting

[@eflinux]

Thanks for your trust, it is a pleasure to help others :)

[@koushik7604]

exactly...even I didn't know about Arch before visiting (or getting recommendation about) this channel. These videos are definitely awesome.

[@craigw4644]

Nice, very clean. I've changed DEs before, but doing it this way is much cleaner and faster.

[@Appalling68]

That was glorious...just glorious. What an absolutely kickass How-To video. Thank you once again, Ermanno! Edit: You should be at 100k subscribers by now. WTF?!

[@eflinux]

Thanks man!

[@Jaystar1138]

Very niche market. The majority of the world runs Windows and most people are not technical. But he has a good base for such niche content.

[@samienr]

Hey man, I just found your channel and am absolutely loving the content you produce. I’ve been watching each of your videos and benefitting so much. Thank you for your help and and keep up the great work!

[@eflinux]

Thank you for your support!

[@SearInMinecraft]

This tutorial is great! I can finally start my Arch Linux installation over again without even installing it again. Because I have been installing desktop environments and window managers so I could pick the one I want. (Which of course is a window manager I will not be saying for now.) And I wanted to clean up the installation because there were so much bloat that came with the desktop environments.

[@TechyMechie]

I wanted to do this from time to time and i thought, if i would backup everything important, then i could just clean install... and that was what i did but back then, i could not find such a nice guide to follow! thanks!!

[@eflinux]

Glad you liked it!

[@Andremzsptm]

Thanks for the multi-line commenting tip on vim. I've always wanted to know How to do It.

[@eflinux]

My pleasure!

[@daviddupoise6443]

Very useful exercise and you set it up so well. Thank you. For future use you installed the reflector package twice. Honestly, you may want to keep it as you have, just for the pun ;)

[@tiktok.4527]

Thank you for this excellent video, Ermanno. Always like the way you describe about Arch Linux, because it's very clear, interesting, and very useful.

[@eflinux]

Glad it was helpful!

[@sidicleisebastiao9255]

Congratulations again Ermanno! Nice tutorial, congratulations from Brazil!

[@eflinux]

Thanks!

[@Hexbyte965]

Awesome, time for me to rethink the way I do things again. ;)

[@rubygupta9770]

Wow! This make trying out different desktop environments very easy!

[@marvicdigital]

Thank you very much for your video, excellent explanation as always, and of course a necessary tutorial ... I would like to go back to Arch linux but Void linux has me in love ... Thank you Ermanno.

[@eflinux]

I understand! Void is great!

[@ggorg0]

I would copy my whole home directory to an external drive and then format my arch disk and reinstall it from scratch. Just to prevent clutter

[@eflinux]

That's another way, thanks for sharing!

[@ratthew42]

You could also setup a `/home` partition from the beginning :) That way you can reinstall easily, and also have the same files between distros!

[@CosmicChew]

This is exactly what I was looking for. So tired of reinstalling my system. I like to test out different things. Sometimes I need a method to reset arch. The wiki is there sure. However, the information can sometimes be a bit confusing. Also, I had found some of the data in the wiki outdated. Just a few things here and there.

[@neokovacs187]

Incredible video as always, Ermanno! Would love to see you do tutorials on vim

[@eflinux]

I'll see what I can do, thanks for the feedback!

[@peterjansen4826]

Honestly, these days it is tough to break Arch because it seems rock-stable. I haven't had any problem for over a year, it just keeps working. No problem with a dependency, no problem with any software crashing, only occasionally mirrors getting out sync. Of course there could always be some problem with some software which is not related to Arch, like wine which was broken for around a year due to wrong compiling by the maintainers (a Gentoo-user discoverd this issue) or Steam Proton that does not install required software but that has nothing to do with Arch, Arch itself is 100% stable. Knocking on wood!

[@eflinux]

Hi Peter! Same here, never had a serious issue, but again, it needs to be well maintained.

[@riccardorighetti5632]

As usual a really awesome tutorial Ermanno. Congrats for your high quality job and explanation.

[@atpray]

Your channel is a heaven for arch users thank you

[@yourlinuxguy]

Only video of this kind, keep it up Making this amazing content for us. 👍❤

[@mustafababdullah2485]

Oh yay just got an update!

[@jackelofnar]

Nice guide. I have tended to do a fresh arch install to the same thing

[@lucas4bortoletto2]

Good video quality, as always.

[@eflinux]

Much appreciated!

[@darrenrichard998]

Thanks another great and useful video as always I'm planning to switch from Manjaro to Arch on my laptop, I think I'm Going to try btrfs as my file system and do the snapshot right after the base install. I've been watching videos on btrfs and the snapshot feature looks awesome. but this will come in handy for my main pc which is running Arch and I would like to get rid of xfce without having to do a full system reinstall,

[@eflinux]

Great to hear! Let me know how it goes!

[@gamer-vh9sh]

I just used the base script but I can't connect to my WiFi anymore I don't have anyway to conect to the internet with LAN and I'm stuck in the tty and can't install packages

[@whylde7834]

Fabulous tutorial!

[@eflinux]

Thank you! 😊

[@MrFooSteven]

Good video!! I just finished installing Arch two days after watching one of your videos. I've been testing out different a window manager today, namely SWAY. Do you think you could do a video on that? or maybe an episode on a super light Arch installation the requires minimal amount of RAM to run.. I think i saw a video where someone had a running Arch system with only 200Mb RAM usage

[@eflinux]

Sway is something on my radar:)

[@PestisNonSapien_GMO_exHuman]

Nice. I might have to try that out. Usually I just boot into my install partition and then run my custom install script. /var/cache/pacman and a few other things are cached on a separate partition and remounted in the install script. Usually takes me ~1 minute to install everything from cache. I also have paru save everything it builds so I don't have that slowing me down either. Also do some other trickery involving the caching of git, cargo, and others. But for some reason I don't think doing your reset will give me that fresh feeling I get from a full reinstall.

[@eflinux]

Hi! Thanks for sharing. It's always a matter of personal preference, this method is short of deleting everything except base packages after the partitioning, so it's pretty clean. However, as I said in the video, this is just one way :)

[@arijitkumarhaldar3197]

KZbin is not always reliable...but Mr. Ermanno, Mr. Derek Taylor and Mr. Chris Titus is doing God's work here...and probably Mr. Luke Smith too... May I request you to make an website where we can send you requests for tips...or some video suggestions that you can go through...and choose to reply the ones that you like? Probably make the website on Gitlab Pages using Hugo...it would be a video content in itself

[@lgbtkeyboard]

I'm still unclear about why his channel is underrated.

[@eflinux]

Thanks for your support!

[@AvradeepPatra23]

This is really helpful...thnx

[@eflinux]

You're welcome 😊

[@themihgtydil]

What I would do, I'd make a dedicated /home partition, then reinstall Arch Linux. Nice and clean.

[@deepakshivraj4881]

Hey great video again Ermano. I am stil a noob in arch(Manjaro) and I have some questions. 1. Why would we need to reset the system and if so should we take the backup before of our /home and /root partitions? 2. So after reset I think there is no need to install arch from scratch again since base install would be there even after reset and we need to pick only the DE or WM from there? Finally this is not a question but a request Can you make a video regarding to check the authenticity of AUR if we need to read the code and what should be present commonly in AUR build code and what should not be present in the package Thank you.

[@eflinux]

Hi! So, first question, backup before you start the procedure. Any important data you have should be backed up anyway regularly, but especially before such a procedure. Second, it is really up to you. You can reinstall the base immediately if you like, or, start from scratch. As for the last point, I'll look into it :)

[@deepakshivraj4881]

@@eflinux Thank you for the reply

[@mesutbahtiyar9819]

ty so much:)

[@eflinux]

My pleasure!

[@JorgeRamirez01]

Great Video! Thanks! What happen to the .config files? Let's say that you have some .config files and folders that you created to customize the system, are these files removed when you uninstalled everything? or are still there? Sometimes you want to remove them to start fresh, I think

[@eflinux]

Those should actually not be removed. If they are important you should back them up, if not delete them.

[@Goldman5800]

@@eflinux so if I have samba config, nginx, php, nextcloud, and other config files they will not be removed?

[@noelgeorge9443]

What about packages downloaded from the AUR? Do those get deleted as well?

[@michaelseiler695]

Very cool video

[@Wav10001]

Does the package manager unmark the packages as dependencies once they’re deleted?

[@deliriumcode]

One question: Can we add that disabling gdm command somewhere in the KDE script and which line would be the best place? 🙂

[@eflinux]

Yes, you can.

[@YannMetalhead]

Good video.

[@fawzanfawzi9993]

I would prefer to just reinstall the whole system.

[@吳炯仁]

very cool, using Arch does makes me learn more about GNU/Linux. In the step of flagging --asexplicit package, will it work if I set package group name but I only installed some of the package group, e.g. `--asexplicit xorg` but I only install few of them. I think it should work but I'm not sure.

[@eflinux]

It should work, you'll need also to decide whether you want to remove optional dependencies as well.

[@cunjoz]

Awesome video! let's say i have a piece of software that has a licence attached to it. could i reset my arch without affecting the said software?

[@eflinux]

If it is registered in the pacman cache, it should be removed unless specified as explicitly installed.

[@gustavomariz7769]

Im a newbie to arch and your videos help so much but im just in doubt for how to install my wifi card drivers it seems i need a b43 driver and i cant find how to download it and make it work

[@eflinux]

I assume you are using a Mac, this will help you out for sure: wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/broadcom_wireless#Driver_selection

[@gustavomariz7769]

@@eflinux i’ll look into it thx i may not be using a mac but i think that might help me Edit: got it to work by installing b43-firmware-classic

[@eflinux]

Glad it worked!

[@Don_XII]

What about all the random config files that you made and modified? would this still reset them and remove the one you added? I don't think so, but is there a way as well? or I'm just better off doing a clean reinstall?

[@eflinux]

Config files should remain, so if they are important to you back up them up anyway, if not you should delete them.

[@Don_XII]

@@eflinux I see, is there any way to remove any config files that doesn't come by default with arch and if they do revert them to their original? Thanks

[@eflinux]

I would con into the .config directory and check them out manually. Some of them might be helpful.

[@andrewsilvia5142]

Thank you for this awesome video, I've been looking for a safe way to try different desktop environments without winding up with extra packages. I have a quick question, I have a custom grub config file (I have an encrypted filesystem), is it safe to copy the /etc/default/grub before doing the reset and restore it before rebooting or should I just mark grub as explicitly installed?

[@eflinux]

I'd mark Grub as installed.

[@andrewsilvia5142]

@@eflinux Thank you!

[@christenorio9555]

Try making an reset script icon like a android

[@RicardoPerezLeon]

Hi, Im a noob. with this can covert manjaro to arch keeping the dual boot?

[@eflinux]

Not really, this is Arch only. Manjaro is based on Arch, but uses also other packages.

[@RicardoPerezLeon]

@@eflinux Thanks

[@dc4stuff]

i dont have arch install base

[@thiagolopes4978]

Hey Ermanno, this part of Qttdq is funny, are you speaking French?

[@eflinux]

No why?:) Edit: you meant if I speak French in general, yes I do :)

[@thiagolopes4978]

I was thinking in doing this, in the last week. But my computer is a laptop, and is encrypted with LVM on Luks. Thinking twice, I did nothing. Have you tried this script with the HDD encrypted? - I mean, more packages are necessary? I'll stay with MATE, Papirus Dark and Materia Dark Compact for a while, it's lightweight. My issue is that, sometimes the mouse click is not detected, only after suspending the session, right after booting the system at initialization. Ermanno, you're watching the videos of nvcode?

[@thiagolopes4978]

@@eflinux Can you me recommend good sources to learn pronunciation, such as music? - At least for operating systems we have the same taste. Thanks in advance.

[@eflinux]

You mean for French? I learned that in school, but maybe you could look at rosetta stone if they have something for french.

[@thiagolopes4978]

@@eflinux It's too expensive. Duolingo is present in the AUR, I'll use it instead. Thanks for your help.

[@jigga1704]

Pacman now wants to reinstall old dependencies when reinstalling an old package. I’ve tried everything - why does this happen?

[@jigga1704]

It’s so dumb it does this… there must be a way around it

[@aashaysawant6997]

Can you please do a video on kernel patching?

[@eflinux]

I'll look into it :)

[@aashaysawant6997]

@@eflinux Thank you!

[@shan6333]

Why use "su -" why not just "su"

[@eflinux]

Good question, su - logs you into the full root shell with all the env variables and switches you to the root home directory. The "su" command will give you the privilege, but will not take you in to the root home directory.

[@peterarbeitsloser7819]

@@eflinux su - will also source the shell config files of the root user.

[@eflinux]

Yep, thanks for completing that.

[@Giovanni2862]

Where are the script files?

[@eflinux]

On gitlab.com/eflinux.

[@Giovanni2862]

@@eflinux thank you 😊

[@juliuco_nikel]

sabes más que los ratones colorados ermanno

[@eflinux]

gracias :)

[@juliuco_nikel]

@@eflinux de nada champion or thanks superchampion

[@mustafababdullah2485]

Bruder, ich bin immer noch arbeitslos, mache das Weltunordnung, ich habe zusätzliche Zeit, ich sage nicht viel, um nicht unter meinen Worten zu stehen, ich bin nicht professionell, aber ich habe Zeit, anderen zu helfen

[@tellurian2229]

Ничего не понял, но очень интересно.

[@mustafababdullah2485]

@@tellurian2229 I'm sorry brother I'm not sure what language?