Assuming you don’t want to use the root account the whole time, here’s how you create a user in Linux.

Setup `sudo`

sudo does not come by default on our arch installation. We need to install it and change it’s configuration.

pacman -S sudo

Edit the sudoers file with this command,

EDITOR=vim visudo

then uncomment the line that says :wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL.

…or `doas`

opendoas is the replacement for sudo used on openbsd. It’s more lightweight and secure than sudo. First, install it:

pacman -S doas

Allow all users in wheel group to execute commands.

### /etc/doas.conf ###
 
permit persist :wheel

Run this command to create a user.

useradd -mG wheel -s /bin/zsh USERNAME

Long-form:

useradd --create-home --gid wheel --shell /bin/zsh USERNAME

An alternative to traditional user management is systemd-homed. To use it, you need to enable the service, then create your user.

systemctl enable --now systemd-homed

homectl create USERNAME --shell=/bin/zsh --uid=1000 --member-of=wheel --real-name="YOUR NAME"

If you use BTRFS for your root partition, you can add --storage=subvolume, which will make your home directory a BTRFS subvolume.

passwd USERNAME