I Put Arch On...

For context, I've been getting some old Windows versions working with GPU passthrough thanks to MattKC who has been writing tutorials about it on his forums. I was able to get a Windows XP guest to work on this rig by passing through the 750 Ti, with the RX 480 doing host duties.

It's not as simple as that, the NVIDIA drivers at the time still detected VMs so you need to work around that, and I had to move the virtual PCI-e ports around otherwise there's a conflict between the GPU and the virtual AC97 sound card, and you need to install the F6/floppy drivers for ICH6 so XP can use the virtual SATA ports. But once it's set-up, you've basically got a pretty powerful XP virtual machine. Wanna get Vista and 7 working with this in the future too.

Fun fact, you can run the original GeForce Titan on Windows XP. NVIDIA's last XP-compatible drivers were in 2016.

I put Arch on my laptop 3 weeks ago and it seemed to run fine so now after getting a new SSD for my desktop it was its time install Arch there too. Its completely unsetup so far, but obviously the first thing I had to do was to run neofetch.

The IPS display for my x220 is in the mail so I'm getting it ready with my first encrypted setup of arch.

It's surprisingly boring tbh. Most things, including all the gamepad stuff, work as expected out of the box. It's quite performant and could easily replace a desktop with the dock, but for portability a laptop makes more sense. I'll keep using Steam OS on it, because I don't have a use case for arch on it atm.
~~please ignore smears on the screen~~

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/792820

I'm in love with this big guy :)

And here are the upgraded components:

• 1080P IPS Screen
• 512GB SSD
• DVD caddy replaced by a HDD caddy (intalled an additional 512GB SSD)
• Processor upgraded to an i7-4712MQ
• Grizzly Kryonaut thermal paste upgrade
• US keyboard replaced by another one with Spanish layout (original, found on eBay)
• RAM upgraded to 12GB (enough for me)
• Brand-new original 9-cell battery (also found on eBay)

I don't think I forget anything... well maybe the best upgrade: I use Arch, btw!

I've been using this ever since I got it and besides a couple minor issues such as the touchpad I never use not working and dealing with it's NVIDIA GPU setup it's been working really well.

I've been using dwm for over 2 years now using a custom package that is automatically patched using arch's build system and I've been happily using the tokyo-night colorscheme since late last year.

All this talk about arch left me wanting to install it. So I did on a laptop with a bios from 2009. I used syslinux instead of grub for the first time and it was super simple and works flawless.

That was by far my easiest arch install. I think I am slowly getting good at this.

For context, I had a gaming rig built, with a Ryzen 7950X and an RX 7900 XT. I was dualbooting Windows with Arch, then EndeavourOS, and now back to Arch after coming here and getting the itch again. Had to manually install it since Archinstall was having bugs. Seeing how this goes.

Just going through the packages I need to install now.

Nothing exciting, but it is actually my first Arch install (been using Manjaro for years). Now I can actually say that I use Arch btw.

And yes, I might have used archinstall, I am not smart enough to do it properly :(