I used the archinstall program and it worked well. I opted for a limine boot manager, and btrfs file system. Getting snapper to work, has been a challenge, and I've largely failed. I'll be circling back to the arch wikis on this and/or any snapper wikis I can find.
I've continued to work with the arch distro, and I finally got snapshots to work.
First, if you're using the archinstall installer instead of the tried and true manual method, you'll get snapper integration with the btrfs filesystem (though you have to choose snapper or timeline in the menu)
The archinstall app also gives you a parition/subvolume map that works well with snapshots, or you can manually configure it. The best guess will give you a 1GB boot partition and four btrfs subvolumes.
So long story short, my issues were that I was trying to configure snapper as if I installed it but it was already configured, I basically made a mess of things. All I needed to do was install artch (with btrfs) and then install btrfs-assistant and snap-pac. Boom I have snapshots, but not bootable snapshots
This was another pain point, where it was so problematic to get limine to include the snapshots within the boot menu, in fact I couldn't figure out why wasn't working. In googling, I found grub-btrfs largely automates that whole process. I did another VM with arch using grub, and use grub-btrfs I got bootable snaphots, no fuss, no muss
Edit: I wanted to use limine boot manager, because cachyos has it configured, and I thought to myself, how hard could that be, lol. Also its a good comparison point as I wanted to compare cachyos and arch (in a vm) and make it as close as possible, so there's less variables.
