Now that I have a graphical desktop with the full installation of GNOME, what else do I do to my arch to be able to accomplish my work. The first thing to check is make sure you're not running as root. You should create a user account with lower priveleges and use it for everyday computing.
$ adduser <username>
$ passwd <username> ##give it a password; this is different from the root password
Now that you have a user account, you can use sudo when performing administrative tasks without going to root.
$ pacman -S sudo
$ visudo ##edit your sudoers file using visudo, add your username and give it proper priveleges
Check if you have a firewall. I installed ufw and enabled it.
$ sudo pacman -S ufw
$ sudo ufw enable & ufw status verbose & ufw default deny
I like to monitor my hard drives with SMART. I installed smartmontools. Check the configuration file in /etc/smartd.conf. List your block devices with lsblk.
$ lsblk
$ sudo pacman -S smartmontools
$ sudo vim /etc/smartd.conf ##proceed to edit the file to your case
You should have the habit of checking systemd and journalctl.
$ man systemcltl & systemctl --failed ##to list failed units
$ sudo journalctl
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