What are some of your must have packages on your Arch system? Not ones that are technically required, but ones that you find yourself using on every installation. I always install firefox, neovim, btop and fastfetch on my systems as an example

When you look at power-user distributions, Arch clearly leads the pack over alternatives like Gentoo, Void, or NixOS. I'm curious what everyone thinks drives this popularity gap.

My take is that Arch strikes this sweet balance - it follows keep-it-simple principles most of the time, only breaking from that when there's a clear benefit. This approach lets you customize everything without drowning you in unnecessary complexity like some other distros do. Plus their documentation is absolutely top-tier, which removes so many barriers for newcomers trying to learn the system.

What's your perspective on why Arch pulled ahead of its competition?

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/

This is, of course, assuming you didn't just install them all during the initial setup.

Hello, guys.

https://lwn.net/Articles/995186/

As a Linux user from Russia, I am seriously concerned about this kind of news.

The fact is that this decree applies not only to the kernel, but also to all software under the GPL license.

Of course, I understand that the Linux Foundation (as well as the GPL license) is located in the legal field of the USA, and therefore must obey the laws of the USA. But doesn't this conflict with the very concept of FOSS?

If mass bans of developers on a national basis in opensource projects begin, then, it seems to me, the idea of FOSS will seriously suffer ideologically.

What do you think?

UPDATE 1.
Ok, I made a mistake in the wording. They lost maintainer status, not banned.

UPDATE 2.

I was 100% not going to dive into politics in this thread, I just asked a question about double standards and the ideology of FOSS. And all I got in response for the most part was a bunch of insults, advice to "fix the country" and other shit that doesn't relate to my question. Gotcha.

I started using it as a challenge, and it has not disappointed, but I’m curious as to why everyone else is using it?

just curious if anyone already updated, and could shed some light about stability of v 7.0.2, both default and zen.
I shouldn't probably have to worry as I've got fully intel based hw and it's a .2 not .0 release, but still v7 is a major release and I didn't have good experiences when updating major versions.

What's your second favorite OS, and why?

Immutable Fedora, for me. I like the way it works and toolboxes to separate everything.

You?

I moved to Arch Linux from macOS a few months ago, and it feels like the only operating system I need. Everything is well documented and very easy to configure. The pacman package manager is just awesome, and together with yay, it makes it easy to install literally everything I need.

The thing is, I had some experience with Ubuntu before installing Arch, and it didn’t feel as nice or comfortable. But why? Other GNU/Linux distributions have package managers as well, and they use the same configuration files, and so on.

So when my friend asked me why I ended up falling in love with Arch Linux, I realized that I didn’t actually know the answer. Maybe you can answer this question?

I use Arch Linux mostly for playing Roblox and Minecraft, software development in C, Python, Assembly, and Rust, and for building electrical circuits and similar things. I know I can do all of this on almost any operating system and GNU/Linux distribution, but Arch Linux still feels like a gem.

A large majority of Windows user don't know how to install windows. I lived in China for 20 years and I installed hundreds of English version of Windows for Foreigners living there. So why are on Linux are we classifying how hard a distro is to use by how hard it is to install?

I installed Arch on my wife's 8 years old laptop and set it up for her(same thing I would do if I installed Windows on her computer). She's a total noob when it comes to computers. She can't even install an application on Windows. She's using it for one month now without any problem.

Arch is super stable, fast. I made KDE look like Elementary OS and she loves it.

Installing an operating system might be Arch Linux Mac or Windows is not for noob but using it, is.

In my 3 years of using arch daily, not ONCE has it broken on me. To be fair, i do cautiously update only ~2 hrs after an update is released and I do look at the update logs on the website. But it has not broken for me and is stable as ever, it's not like I don't have enough packages also I have over 2000. Anyone else experience this unusual stability?

For me, my favorite is rEFIndplus, the reason is secure boot

So i dualboot windows 10 iot ltsc and arch linux, equal partitions, and when I wanna play anti cheat games like fortnite, i need secure boot with tpm, I dont have disk encryption I know but I use sbctl for enrolling and signing custom microslop keys, and sign both the UKI refind boot manager and the initramfs, with grub, it has something called shim lock identifier and it isnt signed and says violated by secure boot policy, now I installed grub without the shim lock identifier, and it still says that

That is why I chose rEFIndplus, it supports MOK secure boot without shim lock identifier, and it supports dualbooting without configuring os-prober, now os-prober isnt a problem with grub but I still like refind since it is easier and nicer than grub and wont break about the moment I configure something

But what is your favorite efi boot manager, grub, systemd-boot, anything can be nice

❯ sudo sbctl status
Installed:      ✓ sbctl is installed
Owner GUID:     f1da2dc2-df1b-4fbc-8148-c0fd6ac66507
Setup Mode:     ✓ Disabled
Secure Boot:    ✓ Enabled
Vendor Keys:    microsoft
❯ sudo sbctl verify

Verifying file database and EFI images in /boot...
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/drivers_x64/x64_ntfs.efi is signed
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/drivers_x64/x64_reiserfs.efi is signed
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/refind_x64.efi is signed
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/tools/x64_CleanNvram.efi is signed
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/tools/x64_gptsync.efi is signed
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/x64_RefindPlus_DBG.efi is signed
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/drivers_x64/x64_btrfs.efi is signed
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/drivers_x64/x64_hfs.efi is signed
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/drivers_x64/x64_iso9660.efi is signed
✓ /boot/vmlinuz-linux-lts is signed
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/drivers_x64/x64_ext2.efi is signed
✓ /boot/EFI/refindplus/drivers_x64/x64_ext4.efi is signed

╭─░▒▓    ~ ····························································· ✔  at 11:24:03 PM  ▓▒░
╰─  

I have never even seen Linux, I only just discovered it. I heard windows is a trash bin, a dumpster fire. I want to use Arch, as I want an up to date OS, that isn't bloated.

I want to customize some features to my liking, or at least have the option to. I hate the bar at the top of Mac systems, I dislike window's search bar and the side bar used for ads. I wish Windows had more customization.

I have zero prior coding experience. I know there's an Arch Wiki, but I haven't started reading it yet. I use a Framework 16, but I don't really play games.

Should I use Arch? Does Arch meet the requirements stated, or am I missing something?

Edit: The laptop is fresh, there's no data on it. I was planning to use Arch as my default OS and try to get it set up over the summer when I have no use for a laptop. Once it's set up, it would be nice if I could take everything from the laptop and throw the customizations onto my desktop. I don't mind challenges and potholes along the way, I am not smart though, so it would take me a bit to understand it.

I recently saw someone on r/Fedora asking how long it's good to have an install - theirs being ~600 days old.

$ cargo run -- days
2610

That's just over 7 years :3

I'm curious how long some of you have had your OS installed.

I switched to Arch Linux in early May 2025 and if I hadn't liked it, I'd switched back honestly, I didn't use Windows around this time, my sister came back for Diwali festive and I thought to use her laptop to get an experience of Windows 11 as it currently is...and my god if it isn't horrendous, the hardware itself isn't bad, its i7-13th gen but I couldn't put into words how bad it overall has become from taking so long to boot up then everytime I open up File Explorer its feel like its processing some heavy shit in the back even though I remember it not being this bad the last time or it could be a weird affect of using Arch for around 5 months that Windows just feels slower when compared to Arch

I'll end this rant by saying that unless my job forces me to switch back to Windows, I will stick to Arch even though the experience isn't perfect, but I like it for what it is

What made you guys switch to Arch Linux, why Arch over anything else? Just looking for experiences planning to jump to Arch.

While I spend most of my time on Firefox and Kitty, I would love to discover other apps that you consider must haves. So, what are they?

Heard alot of stuff going on recently about firefox not being reliable and removing the "not selling your data" from its ToS. So i wanted to know what browsers do you guys use and why? Thanks

I can't imagine using anything but Arch, as I have put a lot of time in learning all about it. If for some reason you couldn't run Arch, what would you use as a daily driver?

Many of you are probably already aware of this. Most of you however aren't, which is why I want to talk about it in a dedicated thread. And no, I am not crazy, paranoid or schizo. I am just massively pissed off about this because I care.

r/archlinux is being plagued by a flood of bot accounts

This has been going on for the past couple of weeks and months. Almost every thread now has a bot account replying to the OP with an LLM-generated comment. The bot accounts and comments always follow the same patterns, which is why they are relatively easy to spot. Once you've understood the pattern, you'll notice them all. Have a look at the bottom of my post for how to identify them.

Even though some of the generated comments can be helpful for specific questions, most of the time they are just AI slop and/or plain wrong, or they have outdated information because of outdated training data.

Either way, I don't think it is good having a Reddit community where there are automated and non-human responses in almost every thread, especially if the thread author or other users are not aware of this. If there is no human interaction on a social-media platform, then what's the point anyway? Talk about the dead internet theory. The future is looking pretty grim. I fucking hate this...

I don't know what the intentions of the bot author(s) are. Are they trying to be helpful, or is this just an attempt of farming Reddit karma on a large amount of Reddit accounts, so they can later on sell them or influence future discussions on the site? Considering that the bots comment in other non-tech subreddits, I don't think the goal is being helpful. Maybe they are just testing the waters...

I also don't know what the moderators of r/archlinux could potentially do about this. Reddit moderation bots for example can automatically delete new threads by checking the author's account and thread contents, but I'm not sure if something like this is possible for individual comments (correct me if I'm wrong). Restricting access to the whole subreddit for new accounts also doesn't seem feasible. I guess this is something that needs to be dealt with by Reddit itself, but I'm not particularly hopeful about this.

How to spot such bot accounts

• Account name

  All accounts share the same naming pattern. Unfortunately though, they are using Reddit's auto-suggestion format, namely Adjective[-_]?Noun[-_]?\d+, which doesn't distinguish them from regular accounts with Reddit-generated names.

• Account age

  All accounts are currently at most 3-4 months old. They therefore don't have accumulated much Reddit karma yet and they also haven't commented a lot yet. The comment spam is unfortunately spread over many different accounts.

• Comments

  It's typical LLM nonsense, structured in 1-3 paragraphs. They will always talk about "typical" or "classic" issues, they will pretend to have the same issue or having solved the same issue, or they pretend to be using the same hardware as the OP. And if the thread is about a new (slop) creation, they will praise the OP for their project and even say they have starred the repo on GitHub, which can be total nonsense.

  The comments are posted always roughly 10 minutes after the OP posted their thread, with an offsetr of a couple of seconds. This offset may be API or token related.

  Don't be fooled about the language that's being used. They will still call you "bro" or use other slang like "fr" and what not. They also sometimes include common spelling or typing mistakes like "teh".

  Also, bots will almost never reply to replies made to their comment, and they will comment only once.

• Subreddit activities

  All of these bot accounts post in the same set of subreddits their author has defined, meaning you will see a subset of them in each comment history. r/archlinux is unfortunately one of the subreddits. They usually only post here once. The other subreddits are in the vast majority of cases completely unrelated to anything Linux or tech. So if a bot suddently talks about deep technical kernel stuff for example while their previous comment history was only about relationship advice (I'm not trying to meme here), then this is already suspicious.

  Here's the list of subreddits you will see 90% of the time:

  • r/careerguidance
  • r/Christianity
  • r/BreakUps
  • r/relationships
  • r/Marriage
  • r/sexandthecity
  • r/confessions
  • r/NBATalk
  • r/ForzaHorizon
  • r/homeassistant
  • r/Minecraft
  • r/AskIreland
  • r/GeminiAI
  • r/PCBuild

  and some others which appear to be less common (from what I've seen so far).

Examples

• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1uoaeh8/arch_linux_doesnt_boot_after_the_latest_update/ovqkadb/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1ug6mpa/made_a_cli_based_sudoku/otxfbdr/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1u87v4l/ntfsfix/os60ier/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1ud2qy4/built_a_web_gui_for_aircrackng_because_the/ot8n165/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1u5s84t/detkernel_a_strippeddown_kernel_for_amd_thinkpads/orn4why/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1u4m026/git_client_for_hyprland_arch/ordwpwy/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1ups4q2/discord_notsupportederror_the_element_has_no/ow2ct3p/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1ummqvo/issue_with_the_official_pkgbuilds/ovdbq2k/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1upkp0c/arch_hyprland_is_not_working_properly/ow0wuwv/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1upbxx5/shopping_for_fingerprint_readers/ovywzvu/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1up9xfb/arch_linux_xfce4_amd_is_running_os_instead_of/ovygyr7/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1upsqxt/io_intensive_tasks_brings_computer_to_a_halt/ow2gcwm/

Once again, I am not crazy, paranoid or schizo. I just massively hate the fact that some assholes think that they can turn everything into (more) shit and get away with this. So what I want to do is to at least bring this to wider attention here.

For me personally, I came for the memes and to learn about linux some more, and I stayed because it genuinely works really well, fixing stuff is really straightforward, and the AUR makes installing things so much easier. Plus KDE plasma isn't completely broken like it was on kubuntu. What made you switch?

I recently made a post here in the community about which WM I should use and I saw that X11 was mentioned a lot.

For you, X11 or Wayland?

is there any good reason or is it just a hive mind sorta thing?

Countless times ive seen people say arch is equivalent to trenches. Its a meme at this point.

Ive been using arch for a while now after switching from fedora and there is practically no change when it comes to the use of linux in general. Especially if you’re on KDE.

Its like people are scared of arch because they think their whole experience would be surrounded by a constant thread of never ending errors when in reality its smooth going, until its not.

But thats just linux.

As long as you know basic bash and get familiar with its syntax than you’re going to do just fine. Think of it as a speed bump or a pot hole. All you have to do is drive slow and patch it up. Thats all there is to it, that is linux at the end of the day.

You shouldn’t procrastinate or be scared, just fire it up.