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!
So you were troubleshooting archinstall? I have never used it, but I would have thought the full manual Intel instructions were less opaque.
As a bit of advice for next time, you can do a YouTube search for an install that more or less follows the wiki. Kai Hendry comes to mind. It may demystify some of the parts.
As logical and helpful as youtube tutorials can be, I just don't like them. Which is entirely a self-imposed problem, for sure, and there's lots of times where I'd have solved a problem quick and simple with a patient sit down with a two minute video. I think it's one of those ol' ADHD and/or Autism quirks, I can never sit still for tutorial videos and I intentionally avoid them because I get stressed thinking about watching them, which is definitely silly, but the human brain is often a silly thing...
That being said, I fully recognize the fact that it's absolutely my own fault when I run into issues like this one, so I never blame the software I'm fucking with lmao, just assume I messed up or am not being patient enough. Hence why I sat and stared at "Waiting for timesync to complete" for roughly 3~ hours before deciding that, yeah, it definitely wasn't completing this go around. And then three attempts later I decided to let it sit while I went to sleep, in the hopes that maybe, just maybe... (Spoiler, it did not complete while I was asleep, to no ones shock but my own)
I get a lot of "work smarter, not harder" advice... never seems to stick, clearly... It's fun though. It's mentally stimulating, if nothing else. Like trying to solve the worlds easiest rubix cube while running on -72 hours of sleep and zero caffeine. Infuriating to watch, but hard to get bored!