I invested some time to understand the command cryptsetup luksFormat that is used for disk encryption on Linux and to figure out a secure choice of parameters that work best for my needs and the hardware I have. Within I present to you my learnings about encryption (Key Derivation Functions, KDF for short), my hardware-specific recommendations (I use a AMD Ryzen 5 5600G CPU and 32 GiB of DDR4 RAM), and how you need to adjust the parameters I chose for myself if you have less RAM than I use.
Especially in the 2020’s, as corporations and for-profit companies increasingly enshittify their services and surveil us, people are discovering the benefits of self-hosting open-sourced applications and owning the digital infrastructure they depend on. For most people that probably means renting a VPS from the likes of Linode, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, or Hostinger. Being solely responsible for the administration of a server that is accessible from the internet can be a scary thought due to all the botnets that will constantly try to break into your server from the moment it goes online. Apart from the general security worries regarding having a server accessible to anyone and everyone with malicious intentions over the internet, folks who are entirely new to self-hosting might not even know how to get started and what to do after giving a VPS provider their money. In this article I describe the first steps I take on a fresh VPS. If I’m wrong or miss a crucial step, you are welcome to contact me and I’ll integrate your corrections. 🙂
Guiding through the process of installing Arch Linux, encrypting the disks with LUKS, abstracting away the storage with LVM, using BTRFS subvolumes, with an optional step for replacing mkinitcpio with dracut for generating initramfs images.
There already are many guides out there for how to install Arch Linux, on YouTube in video form and in written form. I watched most if not all videos that someone doing a simple Google/YouTube search would find. Here I present to you what I compiled after watching all of them, and after reading the official installation guide on the ArchWiki in 2026. I present to you a "best of", so to speak, after gathering from each consulted resource what it had to offer and after removing/updating commands that are now obsolete or no longer best practice (like installing the (U)EFI applications within /boot/efi rather than in /efi).
My goal in particular is to explain each command and not just to show it. Otherwise you might be right in questioning why the world needed yet another installation guide. While I give my best to explain every command and keep this tutorial beginner-friendly, I will teach you advanced and very advanced Linux concepts from which you don't need to shy away after my explanations, that I didn't see covered in most of the existing resources other than the ArchWiki. I make the case that a written guide is more appropriate than a guide in video form, simply because you don't have to pause or rewind every few seconds as with a video.
Do you still remember what you learned four semesters ago? No? How about one semester ago? No? Well, how did you study the material? By reading and re-reading textbooks, while annotating and highlighting interesting parts, as most students do? I hate to break it to you, but such so-called passive learning techniques aren't successful learning strategies, as you have experienced firsthand. Even taking notes and summarizing passages in your own words isn't an optimal study method. Read on to learn what are the best study strategies (backed by evidence) and what's the only way to ensure high learning retention rates so that you actually remember what you're studying