Installation

Installation is pretty straight-forward, and it's supposed to be on a fresh Arch (or Artix) installation since it changes some things system-wide.

Make a New User ~

First, create a new user in the wheel group, with a new home directory:

uesradd -mG wheel [username]

Then uncomment the line that gives the wheel group access to superuser (i.e., sudo) commands, which should look like this:

%wheel      ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

That's your new user with sudo privileges!

Install yay ~

Some programs aren't hosted on the official repositories, and are instead residing in the AUR (Arch User Repository). To access them, yay is arguably the best AUR helper out there, so you'll need to clone yay-bin using git and install it (-bin meaning "binary," since we don't want to compile the program ourselves). You'll also need base-devel for the compilation tools:

pacman -S git base-devel
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-bin.git
cd yay-bin
makepkg -si
cd ..
rm -rf yay-bin

Install the Programs ~

First, install the programs, fonts, icons, and required dependencies (as listed on Programs) from the official repositories and the AUR using yay:

yay -S bluez bluez-utils brightnessctl chafa dunst eza fastfetch ffmpeg ffmpegthumbnailer fish htop imagemagick lf libnotify librewolf-bin maim man-db micro mpc mpd mpv ncmpcpp neomutt networkmanager noto-fonts noto-fonts-cjk noto-fonts-extra numlockx papirus-icon-theme pass picom pipewire-pulse pulsemixer rofi slop ttf-jetbrains-mono-nerd udiskie unclutter wireplumber xclip xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-xprop xorg-xwininfo xss-lock xwallpaper yt-dlp zathura zathura-cb zathura-djvu zathura-pdf-mupdf dashbinsh ttf-twemoji wallust freetype2 fontconfig fribidi imlib2 libexif libx11 libxcb libxext libxft libxinerama libxrandr libxrender

Git Programs ~

I've forked and edited the source code of a bunch of useful programs (dwm, dwmblocks, nsxiv, and slock), which are hosted under their respective Git repositories. You'll need to use git to get them:

mkdir Programs/
cd Programs/
git clone https://codeberg.org/meskuku/dwm
git clone https://codeberg.org/meskuku/dwmblocks
git clone https://codeberg.org/meskuku/nsxiv
git clone https://codeberg.org/meskuku/slock

These programs must be compiled and installed manually (obviously). To do that, cd into each one of the cloned directories and run: sudo make clean install in each one, and once you're done, you can safely remove the Programs/ directory with all its sub-directories.

Clone the Dotfiles ~

Using git again, clone my dotfiles on your ~/ (i.e., $HOME directory):

cd ~
git clone https://codeberg.org/meskuku/dotfiles
cd dotfiles
mv -f .config/ .local/ ~
cd ~
rm -rf meds-dotfiles

Silent Boot ~

If you optionally want to have a silent boot process with GRUB and a custom graphical boot splash screen, consider installing plymouth first:

yay -S plymouth

Next, you need to open /etc/default/grub with a text editor and set up GRUB's default kernel parameters and timeout:

1. Set GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to quiet splash.
2. Set GRUB_TIMEOUT to 0.

Then, update GRUB:

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Next up, open your text editor again in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and add plymouth to the HOOKS=(...) array; make sure your addition is after systemd and before encrypt or sd-encrypt, if those exist.

Finally, clone my Plymouth theme and run the script (which will install the theme and regenerate the initramfs):

git clone https://codeberg.org/meskuku/wiggle
cd wiggle/
sh INSTALL.sh

You could remove that directory afterwards, of course. If you don't like my Touhou Project boot splash theme, then there's not much I could do about it, sorry. Just install another theme and remove /usr/share/plymouth/themes/wiggle/.

Change the Shell ~

The last step is to change your user's shell to fish:

echo $(which fish) | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
chsh -s $(which fish)

You can also change the shell for the root user (by running sudo chsh -s $(which fish)), and once you're done, you can simply reboot and log into your new user! Enjoy. <3