Pacman

I have a few quality of life configurations set in /etc/pacman.conf

# Use wget. NOTE: you need to install wget first
XferCommand = /usr/bin/wget --passive-ftp -q --show-progress -O %o %u
Color
CheckSpace
VerbosePkgLists
ParallelDownloads = 5
ILoveCandy

[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

AUR

The AUR is really convenient. An easy way to use it is paru.

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
cd paru
makepkg -si

MakePKG

Most of the magic happens at the MakePKG stage. So here are some optimisations. All of these configurations appear in /etc/makepkg.conf.

Optimised binaries

Make sure CFLAGS contains -march=native, and RUSTFLAGS contains -C target-cpu=native

Parallel Compilation

Set MAKEFLAGS to -j$(nproc).

Hooks

snap-pac

Snapper is useful if you use btrfs, you can install it via pacman -S snapper. Additionally a nice gui is btrfs-assistant installed via the AUR paru btrfs-assistant.

snap-pac automatically takes snapshots before and after running pacman installs.

pacman -S snap-pac

needrestart

Checks which daemons need to be restarted after upgrades.

paru needrestart

rebuild-detector

Detect which packages were built using older versions of dependencies and need to be rebuilt to function properly.

pacman -S rebuild-detector