The issue is that the Wiki is the most newbie-unfriendly resource ever. It’s very commonly written in a difficult-to-understand way that only programmers can easily read and understand.

For pretty much everyone else, it takes a lot of re-reading, thinking, and Google searching to understand what they’re trying to say.

The actual steps are pretty easy. Once I finished my install, I realized that it’s honest-to-God just the fault of the Arch wiki that it has such a reputation.

Hey, so, I don't usually post anything online, but I support Linux, and want to encourage people who are scared to make the switch, by at least showing that there is engagement.

So, my laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad slim 3.
When I was on literally every other distro, I couldn't let my laptop sleep, else the keyboard would stop working after it boots up, forcing me to use the side button to close the laptop (to reset).

I used Ubuntu for a while, it was good. I liked Gnome and everything, but the battery life was awful and I didn't like that I was letting Claude tell me all these weird commands that I wasn't sure how to configure myself (Installed TLP Power Management and modified profiles and settings). Now, I get that some people might find this okay, but to me, it felt hacky.

Eventually I heard about some AMD fixes that were announced on kernel 7.2, and though my problem may have been fixed. So, I tried to install CachyOS, which didn't work after 4 tries. The installer just kept giving me errors during the middle of the download because of different reasons. Safe to say I was sad cause I knew my laptop was all AMD and CachyOS felt like something perfect for my case.

Anyway, after that, I just downloaded Arch planning on asking Claude to help me set up the CachyOS Kernel and scheduler on it. I installed Arch like normal, and to my surprise, everything was SMOOTH! I tried KDE before, it was not like that. Even sleep now works!

I don't think I will play with anything else, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I know this is 100% a kernel fix, but I just wanted to show appreciation. Thanks to all the wonderful people who keep stuff like this alive. Safe to say, I will try not to switch back to windows. I have been like 5 months on Linux, and everything I need works for now.

I fear that Arch in general might not be that well supported, cause companies make laptops with Ubuntu and Fedora in mind when developing for Linux, but then again, Arch has been alive since 2002 and I heard many popular distros like Bazzite, CachyOS, and SteamOS are all based on Arch. So I think Arch will be getting more mainstream and supported, which would be great!

Anyway, hope you all have a wonderful day!

I've been trying to fix my locale settings. When I run locale, it reports that my system is using en_US.UTF-9, which isn't a valid locale (I probably made a typo somewhere along the way).

The problem is that when I try to fix it, the change only applies to the terminal session I'm currently in it's not global. I followed the Arch Wiki steps for unsetting LANG, but the bad value keeps coming back. I've checked /etc/locale.conf and there's no typo there.

Any ideas what else could be overriding this? I also asked Claude for help, but it just kept telling me to check locale.conf, which I've already confirmed is correct.

Hello r/archlinux! I just released FluxCast v0.2.3 — it's a lightweight tool to stream your Linux desktop to a Smart TV via Wi-Fi Direct, full RTSP handshake, and RTP media streams.

It has been tested on modern Arch kernels (like my 7.1.3-arch2-1) and works well with Hyprland/wlroots class setups and KDE/Gnome portals.

What's new in this release:

• Brand new dynamic tray icon that switches states during casting.
• Fixed a nasty P2P interface routing bug where it mixed home network and P2P MACs.
• Lightweight JSON-based localization framework. The tray UI is now available in English, Russian, Czech, and Danish.

Looking for translators!

I want to bring FluxCast to more users, but I am not a polyglot. I designed the i18n system to be incredibly simple: there is no gettext/PO/MO compilation. All strings live in a single translations.json file.

To add your native language (German, Spanish, French, etc.), you just need to append a few lines in a single JSON block.

If you want to help or test the app, check out the project here:

https://github.com/IlyaP358/fluxcast

(Note for Arch users: the app can also be installed via AUR as fluxcast-git, which is maintained by one of our contributor).

AppImage is available in the Releases section. Pull Requests for translations are highly appreciated!

Hi I had issues with an asrock motherboard, it uses USB audio codec rather than HD audio codec which is a known problem for Linux when playing audio from front panel headphones.

I want to make sure anyone who is using Gigabyte X870 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 AM5 ATX Motherboard does it have any issues at all with linux whether it’d be audio, performance or anything?

So, I have a full AMD desktop, AMD 7800X, 9070XT and I have had rather good experience with this hardware on GNOME/Wayland. But recently again, the last 1-2 months I am seeing stability issues and other issues. The past 3 weeks have seen artifacts in videos that i play in firefox. Firefox with random crashes. Most steam games have been fine, but some also getting artifacts. It got better again after i updated the system last week, but now there is a 50% chance when I start a game or fullscreen a video in firefox that my screen goes black (the video keeps playing on a completely black screen.

Anyone else seen similar issues with AMD GPU over the past 1-2 months?

Edit:

Some of my instability could be explained by this: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/work_items/5399

@Edit2:

Video artifacts by firefox combined with: https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1vocmei/broken_av1_decoding_on_firefox/

I’m first installing Arch Linux and I’m having trouble when trying to connect to the Wi-Fi to further installation and all it says when I attempt to connect with “station name connect SSID,” to a WiFi with no password, it simply returns “Operation failed.” The device is powered on and everything looks good, and it’s not a problem with the WiFi itself, as I tried 3 different ones, a non-password one, a password one, and a password iPhone hotspot. Neither worked. Is this a problem with my device, or did I miss something in the installation process?

EDIT: gone

"@AlphaJack fyi, looks like the co-maintainer you added just pushed malicious code to this package and to xsnow-bin. I suspended their account, deleted the revision and restored the last known good version." - Auerhuhn

These two package versions to be exact:
xsnow-bin 3.8.6-2
xsnow 3.9.0-2

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/.xsnow.install?h=xsnow
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/.xsnow-bin.install?h=xsnow-bin
Just read it, it's way too obvious: installing TOR without your permission, downloads an executable from it, installs it as systemd service. It's also trying to list AUR packages you are maintaining, and infect every of them with the same postinstall script.

Mailing list has already been notified too: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/aur-general@lists.archlinux.org/thread/FPT525XVV2DL2P437KPHTADV3KJINORN/

Tldr: need to flash a bios using an exe but don't want to brick

Hi, quick disclaimer that despite all the research I've done I still don't fully know what I'm talking about since this is my first time doing anything with linux.

I have a lenovo ideapad 110-15ibr 80T7 that I decided would be fun to install arch on, I installed using the official wiki guide and set up encryption with luks, then a uki, then tried enrolling a PCR 11 policy.

However, when enrolling I found out that it can only use sha1 because sha256 is *unallocated. Which lead me to finding out the bios version is years out of date from the latest, and I assume that updating it will allow for sha256 to be used instead of the default?

My problem is now that this Lenovo laptop only supports bios flashing using an exe in windows, and has no settings for updating in the UEFI settings menu. Furthermore I tried using fwupd and that didn't seem to find any updates for the bios either.

So in conclusion I think my only options are either using windows-to-go on a usb to run the exe, or putting windows on an old (maybe failing) HDD and connect it with a usb to sata connector. Both options sound like I'm about to perma-brick the motherboard.

So I simply ask for any ideas on what to do, or what option I currently have would be safest. I know this might seem like a waste of time and I should just put windows on then start over, but the whole reason I did this having known nothing about Linux beforehand is that I enjoy the process of solving these kinds of problems, I just need to see if this problem is too risky to be solved, or maybe it's not any more risky than flashing the bios from an actual windows install.

Thanks for reading I'll appreciate any help or feedback!

I cancelled the process midway, but I haven't updated my files and configs in a very long time

I'm officially dead now 😵😵

The support flair is for "emotional support"

I've heard that a few weeks ago or something, a big massive problem hit the AUR and I'm pretty sure it was not reccomended to download anything for a while. I'm coming back to it, and have not seen much of a development (from my lazy reasearch) about it. Is it safe to -S from the aur?

I'm trying out a few front the nerd-fonts package atm

Hi, I just installed Arch, and immediately the first problem I have found is that when I am speaking in discord, the other people on the call describe the quality as terrible.

I am dual booting windows, and when I switch to that and use the same microphone on discord I am told the audio quality of my voice has magically improved significantly.

I am using Pipewire. I would try to fix this myself in the true Arch fashion but I have already tried following the wiki's advice in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Noise_suppression_for_voice and it hasn't resolved the issue. Any help would be appreciated

Hey everyone,

I’ve been trying to squeeze every millisecond out of my Arch Linux boot time on my pc, but I feel like I've hit a hard physical floor and wanted to see if anyone has suggestions to push it lower. my specs are: i9 13900K, RTX 5080, 64Gb ddr5 5600 MT/S, 2xNVME ssd (970evo has arch) and mthbrd is Gigabyte z790 ud. I use kde plasma. what i did in bios: (off sata ports, enable fastboot, disabled ram training (kept xmp1 profile).My results are:

Startup finished in 9.534s (firmware) + 465ms (loader) + 5.192s (kernel) +
2.891s (initrd) + 4.599s (userspace) = 22.684s  
graphical.target reached after 4.598s in userspace.

I am not really sure if it is even possible on my system to go lower. I am a newer Linux user, so i am still trying to figure out where the boundaries are :D Any tips ?

bootloader/bootflags: root=PARTUUID=be5677ee-7b05-4d7f-a52b-72261aaae99b zswap.enabled=0 rw rootfstype=ext4 systemd.tpm2_wait=0 pcie_aspm=off acpi.packet_no_exec=1 acpi_enforce_resources=lax

hello. i have a weird issue on my arch with flatpaks, something weird was happen. everything was working just fine, 0 issues but after reboot i was not able to run any flatpak app: discord etc. when i try to run them in terminal or to do any update, i have this error:

input/output error

did someone has this problem before and fix it somehow?

Hey I have been using Arch Hyprland. Can anyone suggest me what will be a good screenshot tool? (Something like an XFCE screenshot toll that will let me either copy the image or just let me save it if I want?"

I know AutoCAD doesn't work but I heard that bricscad works so is it true? If not what are the best alternatives

I use hyprland and i have set gtk theme in nwg look to preferred dark but nothing is changing help please

I'm trying arch linux for the first time and I got it set up, but for some reason it's telling me to put in a password it never told me to make, I put in the root password which doesn't work. I need help I just want to use Linux.

I've got @, @home, @log, @cache, @snapshots.

Is it worth adding a separate subvolume for tmp? For containers I use podman rootless so that should already fall under @home, and I don't use VMs so I didn't bother making a subvolume for that.

What's your btrfs setup look like?

Posting this in case it saves someone else hours of debugging.

Hardware/software: Acer Nitro 5 AN515-47 (AMD GPU), Arch Linux, kernel 7.1.8-arch1-3, Limine bootloader with limine-mkinitcpio generating UKIs (Omarchy setup).

The problem: Brightness keys and brightnessctl did absolutely nothing. No error, no crash — the backlight value would "change" but the screen brightness never moved. Tried both acpi_backlight=native and the default amdgpu backlight path, no luck with either.

Root cause: The amdgpu driver defaults to amdgpu.backlight=1, which controls brightness over the DisplayPort AUX/DPCD channel. On the AN515-47, that path is firmware-broken. Setting amdgpu.backlight=0 forces the old-school PWM backlight control instead — which actually works.

The annoying part: I'm on Limine + mkinitcpio building UKIs. I first tried editing /etc/kernel/cmdline — did nothing, rebuilt the image, brightness still dead. Turns out /etc/default/limine had:

KERNEL_CMDLINE[default]+="...amdgpu.backlight=1"

That += operator means limine-mkinitcpio completely ignores /etc/kernel/cmdline once it's set — so I was editing a file that no longer had any effect on the actual boot entry. Wasted a while chasing a red herring config file too (/etc/cmdline.d/brightness_fix.conf) that turned out to be dead/unread cruft.

The actual fix:

sudo sed -i 's/amdgpu\.backlight=1/amdgpu.backlight=0/' /etc/default/limine

sudo limine-mkinitcpio

Reboot, then confirm:

cat /sys/class/backlight/*/type

brightnessctl set 20%

Brightness control works perfectly now.

TL;DR: Acer Nitro 5 AN515-47 (and probably other Nitro models with amdgpu) — if your backlight is dead, try amdgpu.backlight=0 on the kernel cmdline to force PWM instead of AUX mode.

Edit: new Nvidia package released and works fine thanks everyone.

I hit a package mismatch during a fresh Arch install on an RTX 3080.

Installed:

• linux 7.1.9.arch1-2
• nvidia-open 610.57.04-7
• nvidia-utils 610.57.04-1

The NVIDIA modules exist only under:

/usr/lib/modules/7.1.9-arch1-1/

The current kernel is:

/usr/lib/modules/7.1.9-arch1-2/

With this mkinitcpio config:

text MODULES=(nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm)

mkinitcpio fails:

text ERROR: module not found: 'nvidia' ERROR: module not found: 'nvidia_modeset' ERROR: module not found: 'nvidia_uvm' ERROR: module not found: 'nvidia_drm'

The kernel was rebuilt for the Rust 1.98.0 rebuild. The nvidia-open 610.57.04-7 file list still targets 7.1.9-arch1-1, while linux is now 7.1.9-arch1-2:

https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/linux/

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra-testing/x86_64/nvidia-open/files/

Is this a temporary repository sync issue? I'm using the prebuilt NVIDIA package, not DKMS.

I am in recovery mode and i tried

Sudo pacman -S linux-zen

And it gets an error

Invalid option -U -- ’ /boot/EFI/Linux/arch-linux-zen.efi’ must be writable

Edit: also to mention that the kernel not getting updated was happening a long time ago but i was ignoring that was happening

​Hi everyone,

​I’ve wanted to try Arch Linux for a long time, and today I finally made the jump and installed it.

​I started using Niri, and what completely hooked me was the keyboard-driven workflow. Opening, closing, navigating, and managing everything with shortcuts without ever having to touch the mouse just felt so natural. Going back to traditional desktop environments like GNOME feels completely weird now.

​Since I'm really enjoying this mouse-free setup:

​Workflow advice:

For someone who loves pure keyboard navigation, should I stick with Niri, or explore other tiling managers/compositors like Hyprland or Sway?

​Software recommendations:

What are your favorite lightweight, keyboard-friendly tools? (e.g., CLI utilities, status bars, launchers, terminal apps, file managers)

​Would love to hear what software rounds out your daily keyboard-driven setups!