Reference Arch Install (Encrypted / and suspend to disk)

Table of Contents

Prep

Any non-Nvidia Lenovo Thinkpad will work. Anything else you should research first
"Business class" laptops from Dell or Lenovo usually work
Most other consumer laptops work, but you get poor value for money and higher probability of issues
The golden rule when choosing a laptop for Linux is Skip Nvidia. Intel and AMD are fine.
Touchscreens are worthless. They are inefficient compared to mouse+kb on desktop operating systems. They drain the battery faster and jack up the sale price. Dedicated tablets like Wacom work better if a touchscreen workflow is really needed.
Boutique products exist like purism and system76 but if you're just going to throw money away, send it to me instead

Use a search engine to see if the laptop model has a page on the Arch Wiki
See if any other Linux distributions work on the laptop. They are all the same. If it works with Ubuntu, it will work with Arch
If you can't find info for the specific model, you can research the following specific things:
- CPU (Intel/AMD)
- GPU, if any. Avoid NVIDIA at all costs. Ignore online success stories.
- Wifi/Bluetooth
- Sound Card (research ALSA/PulseAudio support)
- Touchpad (research libinput support)
- Suspend/Resume(On older laptops, S3 suspend is good. Newer laptops only support S0, it works fine)

Follow the official guide. Make sure you have a second internet-connected device for troubleshooting.

cfdisk /dev/nvme0n1
- choose GPT partition table
- make a 1G partition for /boot/, toggle it bootable, and change its type to EFI System
- make the remaining free space one Linux filesystem partition

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel networkmanager gnome emacs git vim linux-firmware xf86-input-libinput xf86-video-intel intel-ucode firefox acpi_call tp_smapi x86_energy_perf_policy gdm stow keepassxc bluez cmake chromium ttf-iosevka-nerd gnome-tweaks ripgrep aspell-en grub fprintd power-profiles-daemon bash-completion okular ebook-tools rsync gdb
genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and put encrypt and resume before filesystems in the HOOKS array:
generate ramdisk:
- mkinitcpio -p linux

pacman -S grub efibootmgr
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=grub --removable
edit /etc/default/grub and add the following kernel parameters:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="loglevel=3 quiet cryptdevice=/dev/nvme0n1p2:crypt"

set root passwd: passwd
useradd -m -g wheel -s /bin/bash youruser
passwd youruser
visudo
systemctl enable NetworkManager.service
systemctl enable gdm.service
systemctl enable bluetooth.service
systemctl enable fprintd.service
Now make sure you can boot into the system before continuing with final configurations

Swap is enabled, but we need to tell Grub how to resume from hibernation:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="loglevel=3 quiet cryptdevice=/dev/nvme0n1p2:crypt resume=/dev/mapper/crypt resume_offset=2512896"

filefrag -v /swapfile | awk '{if($1=="0:"){print $4}}'

Don't forget to regenerate the grub configuration:

Now test hibernation after rebooting

MAC address spoofing:
- to turn it on by default, edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and add:

[connection]
wifi.cloned-mac-address=random

[connection]
ethernet.cloned-mac-address=random

same network) will have a random MAC address

set up fast pacman mirrors:
- pacman -S pacman-contrib
- cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.bak
- check arch wiki for the current way to rank mirrors
start up syncthing: systemctl enable syncthing@youruser.service