What CoreDesktop sets up for you.

You end up with a GNOME system with a flexible tiling setup that works on any screen and really shines on widescreens. Hold Super (the Windows key or equivalent) and use the arrow keys to move windows around the screen.

To change the tiling, use the icon in the top right of your screen. You can set it up however you want.

Your ~/.bashrc sources ~/.local/share/coredesktop/shell/bashrc, which sets up:

• the starship prompt (your own ~/.config/starship.toml wins if you have one)
• zoxide: z {part of a path} jumps to a directory you’ve used before
• fzf key bindings: Ctrl+R searches history, Ctrl+T inserts a file path
• eza for ls, ll, la and lt
• the aliases and functions in shell/

Anything you add to ~/.bashrc after the CoreDesktop line overrides it.

Incoming connections are blocked except SSH (22), mDNS (5353/udp), LocalSend (53317) and anything arriving over Tailscale.

Docker normally publishes container ports around ufw, so ufw-docker is installed too. To let a container’s port through, or to open a port for something else, such as a dev server you want to reach from another machine:

sudo ufw-docker allow {container} {port}
sudo ufw allow {port}/tcp
sudo ufw status

To see every open port and who can reach it, run audit.

If / is btrfs (the archinstall default), Snapper takes a snapshot of / before every update and keeps the last 5. /home is a separate subvolume and isn’t included, so rolling back never touches your files. sudo snapper -c root list shows the snapshots.

These snapshots can’t be picked from the boot menu. To roll back, boot the Arch ISO and replace the @ subvolume with a snapshot:

mount -o subvolid=5 /dev/{root partition} /mnt
mv /mnt/@ /mnt/@.broken
btrfs subvolume snapshot /mnt/@.snapshots/{number}/snapshot /mnt/@
reboot

If the disk is encrypted, open it with cryptsetup open first and mount the opened device. Once the system works again, free the space the broken root used:

sudo mount -o subvolid=5 /dev/{root partition} /mnt
sudo btrfs subvolume delete /mnt/@.broken
sudo umount /mnt