It should work with both ways. First time I did them with archinstall(but didn’t like that it created a separate partition for my home directory). Second time I manually partitioned my drive and then let archintstall use that.
I could have installed Linux arch in LESS time, a version known to be finicky and HARD.
I recently had to install arch 3 times since. First time I fucked up, second try the system fucked up and third time worked. With me trying to fix the system this took me 2-3 hours. Most of them trying to fix the second install. The third time I used the installation script(which didn’t worked in the beginning) which made the install easy as hell taking about 10 minutes configuring the install and about 5 minutes installing everything. Later I just had to install gnome which were about 10 minutes total.
Just had to reinstall arch 3 times yesterday, since the installation script fucked up the partitioning.
Reinstall nr1(manually, since the script didn’t work): I forgot to add users and couldn’t log into my machine Reinstall nr2(manually): my mirror lists was so fucked up that I couldn’t install or update packages(there also were some missing databases) Reinstall nr3(script) : finally everything worked.