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!
I had to do some funky messing with networkd and the ntp sync stuff, seems like that’s the barrier to entry for vanilla arch these days