i have ran the forge installer but when trying to open the forge installation in the minecraft launcher it gets most of the way through the installation then displays the following error:

Failed to start download.
Name: 1.20.1-forge-47.4.10.jar
URL: https://piston-data.mojang.com/v1/objects/0c3ec587af28e5a785c0b4a7b8a30f9a8f78f838/client.jar
Error details: 0x0000000d - generic: Permission denied
Couldn't open file for download
Filename on disk: 1.20.1-forge-47.4.10.jar
Path: /home/botfly/.minecraft/versions/1.20.1-forge-47.4.10/1.20.1-forge-47.4.10.jar
Exists: Nonexistent

i am using forge version 1.20.1-47.4.10 and minecraft launcher version 3.35.10-2.6.2 on arch linux
i have attempted reinstalling  to no avail

Looks like the Launcher does not have perms for the /home/botfly/ directory

So you have to grant permission for

/home/botfly/.minecraft/

But I have no idea how this work on linux

Yeah. It looks like it is a permissions issue.

Usually in linux you have to use chmod for modifying.

Doing ls -l should say the permissions. For example when you create a folder, you should get the following permissions by default: drwxr-xr-x

So doing chmod 644 will give it drw-r--r-- permissions. If you really don't care that anyone could read and write, you could do chmod 777 on the folder

Thank you! My issue has been resolved, it seems to work just as it should now.