In this video I’ll walk you through the install process of Manjaro from the CLI interface. this is useful if the graphical installer fails or if you wish to do a more advanced install, for instance with separate /home partition or similar.
Transcript (English)
What’s up YouTube, this is Cristian Herrera. No webcam—it’s too dark. This episode is about installing Manjaro Linux with the text-based installer. The graphical installer failed on an old UEFI laptop (wouldn’t boot), but the CLI installer worked, so this is for those who hit that problem.
Why Manjaro: good beginner-friendly Arch; rolling release; AUR is fantastic—if it’s not in official repos, it’s in AUR.
Setup: I’m using the XFCE ISO in a UEFI VM. Boot the live ISO, skip the GUI installer, open a terminal and run setup. Language during install doesn’t set system language; I use English (easier to search errors), US keyboard for coding; you can pick Swedish keyboard later.
Partitioning (manual): using fdisk. Create GPT (g), then a 300 MB EFI partition (type 1, vfat) and root on the rest (ext4). Write with w. I format root ext4, mount at /, EFI at /boot/efi. Swap: I prefer a swap file about the size of RAM (for hibernation). Don’t use swapfile on Btrfs—use a swap partition instead.
Mirrors & keys: rank mirrors, refresh GPG keys. Don’t use the live system’s pacman cache (it’s in RAM and can OOM), so pick “no”. Enable fsck hook. Install desktop: I add yay (AUR), pick latest kernel or LTS if you have flaky hardware; you can change later. Choose XFCE minimal; full install is optional.
Long install step: on a bad connection the latest kernel failed to download, so I switched to LTS; easy to change later in Manjaro. If you need to check EFI mode, look at /sys/firmware/efi. Disk usage was ~32% of the 30 GB VM after install.
Bootloader: GRUB is the safe, easy choice, especially for multiboot. I tried systemd-boot but went with GRUB for simplicity. Install with grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi, then generate config with grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
Config: generate fstab with UUIDs. Hostname set, locale en_US.UTF-8, keyboard Swedish in desktop, timezone Europe/Stockholm. UTC if pure Linux; localtime if dual-booting Windows. Set root/user passwords. Enable hibernation if swap >= RAM; swappiness ~10. Preload optional (learns frequently used apps).
Reboot: system comes up, Manjaro Hello shows first steps. Learn pacman and AUR tools—most help assumes CLI. Free drivers are usually fine; proprietary only if you need them (e.g., gaming GPU).
That’s it. If you find this useful, like/subscribe/comment—motivation matters. I plan more explainers (HTTP, etc.). Have a nice day!