But this picture of an empty desktop was far too long in the making. it took me a week to succesfully install Arch. I could do the process start to finish, blindfolded, at this point.
Finally, after endless hours of repeating the same steps over and over again, trying to word google searches in just the right way to get just that one specific answer to that one absurd issue, re-reading guides and links over and over again trying to find the single missed Sentence that ties everything together and finally. Finally.
It may seem kinda stupid to consider that an accomplishment, but I feel quite genuinely proud of myself for actually succeeding at this instead of just throwing in the towel and giving up like I usually do when I try and take on new hobbies, and don't immediately succeed.
ETA: Image fix!
but waht was the issue and the fix?
Well, at first I was doing it completely manually, following the installation guide, but I'd get so mixed up in the soup of it all with all those new terms and actions that felt completely foreign yo me. Then I found mention of the simple archinstall command which the guide either hadn't mentioned outright or the mentioning of it got drowned out by all the other words.
It took me a long minute to play around and work out how that worked, but once I finally figured out what was what and all that, I would finally start the install and it would get stuck.
It would get to "Waiting for systemd.timesyncd to complete" but it never would (and I gave it the benefit of the doubt at first, and just waited hours the first try.) On googling, I'd get a lot of approximate answers and explanations that almost but didn't quite match, and the solutions never worked. I'd give up for a bit and then go back to trying it, googling, and I started just trying to troubleshoot it on my own despite really not knowing what I was doing and just throwing random things at the wall and seeing what stuck.
Eventually though, I got the right keywords in the right order on google and came across a reddit post of someone with my exact issue. The solution after that was really, really simple. They had solved their issue by editing /etc/systemd/timesyncd.config, where multiple things were commented that shouldn't have been. I did the same thing and went into the .conf and lo and behold, the entire thing was commented, so I fixed that and boom. Working.
Honestly I'm actually glad that I had to go on such a wild goose chase to fix that little issue, because as frustrating and, in the end, useless that whole struggle ended up seeming, I learned a LOT while struggling. I've edited lots of .conf files, I love modding my games so I'm not shy to dipping my toes in and changing basic values, but did I know what the term "commenting" meant in that context, or even how that stuff worked on a deeper, technical level? Nope. Now I do! Now I know how to do some menial tasks via the console that I hadn't used before. I know better how the disks work, I have a better understanding of partitioning, etc.
I think I much prefered this experience over the one where I just popped in Linux Mint and everything was a-ok from the get-go.
You are a testament to the fact that applying sheer willpower and stubbornness anyone can accomplish anything.
I saw one person say something along the lines of "repeatedly bashing my head against a wall until it breaks". I understood myself a little more after that.