How to Install Arch Linux on a PC or Laptop (2025 Edition - From Windows to Arch)
Nobody warns you about this part: installing Arch takes an afternoon, but moving from Windows is a project. What you do on the Windows side — before the install and after it — decides whether the switch becomes a story you tell proudly or a weekend you quietly bury. Treat it like moving house, because that is exactly what it is.
Take inventory before you uninstall
Walk through Windows like a landlord doing a final inspection. Browser: export bookmarks and let sync carry your logins. Developer: your ~/.ssh folder, git config, dotfiles. Everyone: Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Pictures — the four folders where years of life hide. And save your Windows product key while Windows can still read it aloud:
wmic path softwarelicensingservice get OA3xOriginalProductKey
Copy it somewhere safe. You will probably never reinstall Windows, but "probably" is not a backup strategy.
If you plan to dual-boot rather than wipe, do two Windows-side chores first: shrink the Windows partition from within Windows itself, and switch off Fast Startup. Five minutes each, and they prevent the two most common migration disasters.
Know your hardware while Windows still explains it
Open Device Manager and write down the exact names of your Wi-Fi adapter, graphics chip, and anything exotic — fingerprint reader, card reader. Then search each against the Arch wiki. Nine times out of ten the answer is "works out of the box"; the tenth time, you want to know before you commit the evening, not after. Hardware that needed proprietary blobs five years ago often just works now.
Better still, boot the Arch live USB without installing anything and confirm that Wi-Fi, keyboard, and display brightness all behave. That test drive costs nothing and tells you nearly everything.
The afternoon of the switch
The mechanical install — partitioning, pacstrap, bootloader — is thoroughly documented and I will not pad this page repeating it. Decide beforehand: wipe or dual boot? A wipe is simpler and cleaner; dual boot keeps an escape hatch at the cost of sharing the EFI partition and some discipline. On a laptop with 8 GB of RAM or less, lean toward the wipe and keep life light.
Moving back in
Once the new desktop is up, the ritual: plug in the external drive and pull your old world across:
rsync -avh --progress /run/media/yourname/BACKUP/ ~/Documents/
Restore browser sync, log into your password manager, point git at your keys, set your fonts. The archaeology is honestly pleasant — old photos, that one PDF you needed in 2021. Keep the backup drive untouched for a month, just in case. Then one evening you will realize you have not booted Windows in weeks, and never missed it.
Migration is older than operating systems: leave one system, carry what matters, rebuild somewhere else. Gaza's families have done it under far crueler conditions, carrying their children the way you carried that backup drive — close, and first. May their road home be short.
We move households, not just files. Our weeks at HTG Travels are migration paperwork: a family relocating to Dubai, a student's first UK visa file, grandparents splitting the year between children in three countries. Bring us the mess of documents; sorting other people's important things is literally the job.
