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GNOME Installation

Base GNOME packages for the full GNOME experience. Bundle with other packages to prevent package conflicts providing the same functionality.

TIP: Include any and all packages you want installed in a list to pacman. That way pacman will resolve package dependencies correctly and not install packages that would cause conflicts with other packages later on in the setup; e.g. the gnome group installs pulseaudio, but pulseaudio and pipewire (see below) are conflicting packages, meaning they can't both be installed at the same time prompting you to remove one or the other. Explicitly selected packages take precedence over packages auto-selected via dependencies.

pacman -S gnome gnome-extra

Video Acceleration

Drivers for hardware accelerated desktop rendering, improving performance and fidelity.

Intel

pacman -S mesa vulkan-intel intel-media-driver libva-intel-driver
yay -S intel-hybrid-codec-driver

AMDGPU

pacman -S xf86-video-amdgpu libva-mesa-driver vulkan-radeon amdvlk

Nvidia

Nouveau open source driver

pacman -S libva-mesa-driver mesa-vdpau
yay -S nouveau-fw

Proprietary driver

pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils # Includes Vulkan driver

Audio (& screen capture)

Use PipeWire as a more current and modern low-latency sound server. Also better suited for WebRTC screen sharing and recording in Wayland sessions (GNOME uses Wayland by default)

pacman -S pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-jack pipewire-alsa wireplumber xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

Bluetooth

pacman -S bluez bluez-utils
systemctl enable bluetooth

Spell Checking

pacman -S hunspell hunspell-de hunspell-en_US hyphen hyphen-de

Printing

pacman -S cups logrotate system-config-printer
systemctl enable cups
systemctl enable logrotate.timer

Firefox

pacman -S firefox firefox-i18n-de
echo "MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1" >> /etc/environment
echo "MOZ_WEBRENDER=1" >> /etc/environment

Alternatively, navigate to about:config and set gfx.webrender.all to true to enable WebRender compositor.

Hardware Decoding

Utilizing GPU hardware accelerated decoding of video content results in smoother playback of HD/4K content, while reducing CPU load and power draw. Set the following in about:config to enable hardware accelerated video playback in Firefox:

Setting key Value Description
media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled true Enable VA-API usage
media.ffvpx.enabled false Disable internal VP8/9 software decoders
media.rdd-vpx.enabled false Disable codec sandbox for VP8/9
media.navigator.mediadatadecoder_vpx_enabled true Enable hardware encoding for WebRTC

To test if Firefox is actually using VA-API to decode video you can launch it with the following command:

MOZ_LOG="PlatformDecoderModule:5" firefox 2>&1 | grep 'VA-API'

If your log output reads something like the following video decoding via VA-API is working.

[Child 55975: MediaPDecoder #3]: D/PlatformDecoderModule VA-API Got one frame output with pts=135468000dts=135468000 duration=17000 opaque=-9223372036854775808
[Child 55975: MediaPDecoder #3]: D/PlatformDecoderModule Reusing VA-API DMABufSurface UID = 10

Google Chrome

yay -S google-chrome

Tweaks

To enable hardware accelerated video decoding (with open source drivers) create a file at ~/.config/chrome-flags.conf and add the following line in it:

--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder

Furthermore, visit chrome://flags and set the following options to further tweak performance (use the search field to filter):

Setting key Value Description
#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer Enabled Uses PipeWire to capture the screen in Wayland sessions
#enable-gpu-rasterization Enabled Uses GPU for rasterization, boosting performance
#enable-zero-copy Enabled Accesses GPU memory directly, boosting performance
#ozone-platform-hint Auto Auto-detects which windowsing system is currently in use (X11, Wayland)

Setting up display manager

Start GDM on boot

Start the GNOME Display Manager (GDM) on boot to be presented with a graphical login screen.

systemctl enable gdm

When using Nvidia proprietary drivers

For the longest time Nvidia only supported their EGLStreams interface for Wayland sessions. Despite GNOME having support for both EGLStreams and the more popular GBM interface, the GNOME Display Manager disables the Wayland session via a udev rule, if it detects the proprietary driver is in use, to prevent problems with the login screen not showing.

To force enable GNOME's Wayland session even with the proprietary Nvidia driver installed, check the following files:

  • /etc/gdm/custom.conf: Make sure the line WaylandEnable=false is commented out (should be by default)
  • /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules: Rename the file and create a symbolic link to /dev/null 
    ln -s /dev/null /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules

Keep in mind that Wayland depends on Kernel Mode Setting to function properly, so it is necessary to include the appropriate kernel modules in the kernel image and setting the kernel commandline parameter to enable KMS support for the proprietary Nvidia driver!

  1. In /etc/mkinitcpio.conf add the following modules: 
    MODULES=(nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm)
  2. Rebuild the kernel image 
    mkinitcpio -P
  3. Add the following kernel commandline parameter to your boot manager configuration 
    nvidia-drm.modeset=1

Set Keymap for GDM

NOTE: Executing this command while chrooted into an installation will produce an error that the locale could not be found. Set after rebooting the system, press CTRL + ALT + F3 when GDM shows up (or any F-key between 2 and 7) to switch tty, log in via the command line and execute the command as root.

localectl set-x11-keymap de

Plymouth

ATTENTION: The maintainer of gdm-plymouth.service is discouraging this method and advising to use regular gdm.service.

Optionally, as an alternative, install gdm-plymouth (AUR) for a smooth transition from boot splash:

yay -S gdm-plymouth
systemctl enable gdm-plymouth

See instructions at Plymouth page on how to set up Plymouth.

Generate well-known user directories

xdg-user-dirs-update

Misc additional packages

Additional packages you might want:

Name Description
gthumb Image viewer with simple editing capabilities
lollypop Music player for GNOME
seahorse Secrets manager (login credentials, SSH key passphrases, GPG keys)
fwupd Firmware update manager; allows UEFI capsule updates in GNOME Software if supported by firmware
gnome-software-packagekit-plugin Manage Arch packages in GNOME Software 
pacman -S gthumb lollypop seahorse fwupd gnome-software-packagekit-plugin

Remove potentially unwanted packages

GNOME Dev Tools

pacman -Rsc accerciser devhelp glade gnome-builder sysprof

User Software

pacman -Rsc gnome-recipes

Games

pacman -Rsc five-or-more four-in-a-row gnome-chess gnome-klotski gnome-mahjongg gnome-mines gnome-nibbles gnome-robots gnome-robots gnome-sudoku gnome-taquin gnome-tetravex hitori iagno lightsoff polari quadrapassel swell-foop tali

Customize GDM (wallpaper, logo, message)

  1. Create directories: 
    mkdir -p /etc/dconf/profile
mkdir -p /etc/dconf/db/gdm.d/
  2. Create config files 
    touch /etc/dconf/profile/gdm
touch /etc/dconf/db/gdm.d/01-login-screen
  3. Contents of /etc/dconf/profile/gdm 
    user-db:user
system-db:gdm
file-db:/usr/share/gdm/greeter-dconf-defaults
  4. Contents of /etc/dconf/db/gdm.d/01-login-screen 
    [org/gnome/login-screen]
banner-message-enable=true
banner-message-text='Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet'
logo='/path/to/image.file'
[org/gnome/desktop/background]
picture-uri='file:///path/to/background.jpg'
  5. Update gconf to apply configs 
    dconf update
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