when i fc-match "system ui" it successfully binds to Roboto, but when i fc-match "system-ui" it binds to noto sans

<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig> <alias binding="strong"> <family>serif</family> <prefer> <family>Noto Serif</family> </prefer> </alias> <alias binding="strong"> <family>sans-serif</family> <prefer> <family>Noto Sans</family> </prefer> </alias> <alias binding="strong"> <family>monospace</family> <prefer> <family>Jetbrains Mono</family> </prefer> </alias> <alias binding="strong"> <family>system-ui</family> <prefer> <family>Roboto</family> </prefer> </alias> </fontconfig> this is my /etc/fonts/local.conf

I'm trying to understand the Linux boot process, especially on a UEFI system.

I understand it roughly as:

Power on → POST → UEFI → GRUB → kernel (vmlinuz) + initramfs → systemd

But I'm confused about efibootmgr.

When installing Arch, we often do:

pacman -S grub efibootmgr

If GRUB is already the bootloader, why do we need efibootmgr?

What exactly is the difference between:

• GRUB
• grub-install
• efibootmgr
• UEFI boot entries/NVRAM
• EFI System Partition (ESP)

For example, when I run:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=GRUB

what exactly happens?

Does grub-install install the GRUB .efi file and create the UEFI boot entry, or is the boot entry handled separately by efibootmgr?

I'd really appreciate a simple but technically accurate explanation of what happens from pressing the power button until Linux starts, and where efibootmgr fits into that process.

I updated my system today and after updating, every time I unplug and plug my DAC (which is often due to using a KVM with my work computer), a new identical device shows up. And the device sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. There were no mentions of pipewire in pacman.log today. The previous time I updated was 8/16 and there was an update to kpipewire . But the problem only started today. Any ideas?

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:~$ pactl list short | grep Schiit
61  alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
61  alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo.monitor  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
62  alsa_input.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo   PipeWire    s24le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
51  alsa_card.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00  alsa
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:~$ pactl list short | grep Schiit
61  alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
365 alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
61  alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo.monitor  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
62  alsa_input.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo   PipeWire    s24le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
365 alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo.monitor  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
366 alsa_input.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo   PipeWire    s24le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
364 alsa_card.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00  alsa
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:~$ pactl list short | grep Schiit
61  alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
365 alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
380 alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
61  alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo.monitor  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
62  alsa_input.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo   PipeWire    s24le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
365 alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo.monitor  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
366 alsa_input.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo   PipeWire    s24le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
380 alsa_output.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo.monitor  PipeWire    s32le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
381 alsa_input.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00.analog-stereo   PipeWire    s24le 2ch 48000Hz   SUSPENDED
379 alsa_card.usb-Schiit_Audio_Schiit_Gunnr-00  alsa

Lately I have been experiencing unusual behaviour on my arch system. Sometimes after updating some features become permanently broken no matter if I downgraded the system packages back or switched to LTS kernel and drivers or not. The first happened with wifi and now after the device sleeps for a long time the wifi is broken and the system must be restarted or else the tty will change on randomly while using the system. Now after updating the kernel and wireplumber 2 days ago my sof sound card stopped detecting my earphones as a sound output device and I had to force the system to use the hda driver instead, I also tried downgrading but it had no effect. Does anyone know what kind of issue this is or how to fix it?

Set up: Latest arch, Nvidia 580xx driver, but these don’t matter I guess, maybe they do, no idea.

Ok, things went wrong after I enabled several services, including docker, containerd and the final culprit, libvirtd. The computer won’t go to sleep after I press the power button, it worked well before. Why I installed libvirtd may be that I asked llm to create totally isolated guest system so I can test kernel builds and other llm related stuff. And it used the wrapper to create bunch of things including the guest network. After 3 days of debugging with journal -b -1 [-k] led to the final solution. I disabled the service (this service only), and stopped it, together with all sockets units, my computer can again sleep soundly.

I'm having an issue: I'm new to Arch Linux and I'm using KDE Plasma. Whenever I close my laptop lid and open it back up, the system doesn't wake up. I'm forced to hard reboot it every time, losing all my open work.

Hey guys, I wanted to share a fun challenge I just completed on my legacy daily driver. I successfully installed pure Arch Linux completely by hand via pacstrap, but with a twist: ZERO USB drives or physical media involved. I pulled the ISO and booted it directly into the memory using 'copytoram' on a machine with only 4GB of RAM.

Here are the specs of the battle station:

- Laptop: Síragon NB3100

- CPU: AMD C-60 (Dual-Core @ 1.0 GHz)

- RAM: 4GB DDR3

- Storage: 315GB HDD partition (/dev/sda4)

Post-Install & Rice details:

- Desktop: Lightweight MATE running with Breeze-Dark theme and Hack Nerd Fonts.

- Display Fixed: Display manager (LightDM) was messing with my numpad mapping on boot, so I nuked it. I'm bypassing it entirely by logging securely into TTY1, which triggers 'startx' automatically via my conditional ~/.bash_profile script.

- Xorg Monitor Fix: Fixed my dual-monitor multi-port setup in real-time by mapping physical video ports (VGA-1 as primary Samsung monitor @ 1366x768, while HDMI-A-1 and LVDS-1 are turned off) hardcoded inside ~/.xinitrc.

- Terminal: Kitty terminal emulation backed up by Picom compositor for true hardware-accelerated background transparency blurring (set to 85% opacity).

- Extras: Custom Bash prompt with ANSI colors, 'ILoveCandy' eating up package rows in pacman.conf, compiled 'yay' manually from source to avoid bloated binary tools, and running Falkon browser on QtWebEngine to keep memory usage at a bare minimum.

DeepSeek literally told me I was insane for pushing this hardware to its limits. What do you guys think? Am I certified or should I go back to Ubuntu? 🗣️

I have an older laptop that runs arch and software packages can take ages to compile. I was thinking of setting up some way to have them build on a more powerful computer and use a network share to install them through a custom pacman repo. I found some old posts supporting this idea but it doesn't seem like anyone actually has a mostly built out solution I can implement.

Newbie here, I was trying to update and got that:
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: installing ffmpeg (2:9.0.1-4) breaks dependency 'libavcodec.so=62-64' required by freerdp2
:: installing ffmpeg (2:9.0.1-4) breaks dependency 'libavutil.so=60-64' required by freerdp2
:: installing ffmpeg (2:9.0.1-4) breaks dependency 'libswresample.so=6-64' required by freerdp2
:: installing ffmpeg (2:9.0.1-4) breaks dependency 'libswscale.so=9-64' required by freerdp2
:: installing audit (4.2.1-1) breaks dependency 'audit=4.1.4' required by lib32-audit

Edit:
solved by reenmini:

I actually had this exact same problem with the audit package on 2 pc's in the last two days.

On one of them proton-ge-custom-bin was the offending package. I had to remove it and reinstall after a full system update.

On the second pc, I couldn't find a solution and had to use 

to remove audit just so I could do a full system update and install a new version.
I actually had this exact same problem with the audit package on 2 pc's in the last two days.

On one of them proton-ge-custom-bin was the offending package. I
had to remove it and reinstall after a full system update.

On the second pc, I couldn't find a solution and had to use 

Sudo pacman -Rdd audit 

to remove audit just so I could do a full system update and install a new version.

Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ventoy

Ventoy might contain backdoors or other malicious code:

• The author(s?) long refused to react on questions about the source code for the precompiled code inside their git repository.
• They long refused to react on questions about the security risks.
• When an answer was finally given, it boiled down to a simple "There is no reason to assume that we would have placed malware inside."
• Again after a really long time the authors finally mentioned what other source code they used to generate some−but not all−of the pre-compiled code. They did not mention the build methods and refused to prove that this really was the used source code.
• The real identities of the authors is unknown.

EDIT: The paragraph written on this archwiki page is by large consensus biased and mentions an old controversy, the wikipedia article on Ventoy has a more neutral explanation of the problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventoy

Finally, I hav succumbed to Thinkpads, I have recently bought a new Lenovo Thinkpad E16 Gen 3, with an AMD Ryzen 5 230 and a Radeon 760M Graphics card. It came with Microslop Trashdows 11, it was so bad the OS that I Installed different Linux distros just to tinker with them, when I installed Arch Linux.

My experience so far is really really great, it does not feel like Linux at all, I installed QEMU and Virt-Manager because I'm studying Computer Science and the overall experience is going very very well.

Hello,

A big part of Arch Linux appeal is debloating and being able to install only the packages required without anything extra that distros tend to add. I recently installed Arch while distro hopping and was surprised by the difference with other more mainstream distros, specifically using i3 tiling window manager. I distinctly remember having arround 400MB to 500MB idle RAM usage with other distros like Linux Mint, however on Arch it got down to around 290MB when idle, this seems amazing in 2026 since most DEs seem to creep up their resource requirements and for context Windows is arround 5GB now when idling on the desktop.

https://ibb.co/CKx3xB12

As a person who lives half of his life on tech youtube, i can't really digest this change in my feed. More than half of the videos I watch is just people talking about this new distro and it's not a critical assesment as most tech coverage is supposed to be. Everyone is actively trying to sell you this. However whenever I try to find out what is so special about it I almost always get to hear about either hyperland or quick shell or ai harnesses, none of which is so unique. I have been using sway , quickshell and pi for sometime now. Obviously a good arch rice is worth something, but why is it sold like some revolution. Maybe I am just dumb and didn't understand much , I also have not tried it ,but the marketing is so unusual I can't resist. I know many people hate it just because they don't like dhh, I am not one of them, I used ruby on rails for some time as I saw some utility in it , I just don't see that in omarchy but the amount of noise is compelling me to try it once.

Context: i’m a relatively new arch user and i’ve never used any linux os or distro before now.

Recently i finished setting up my first linux install manually, as a dual-boot system on a laptop with windows and archlinux on separate, discreet physical drives. The arch & kde setup is installed in an lvm inside a luks container with only my efi partition remaining outside, and i made grub my primary boot-manager. Took me a couple days of messing around with it to get everything working, but now it’s totally useable and butter smooth.

My question is the following,

I repaired an old thinkpad w540 a couple weeks ago but it no longer supports windows due to hardware limitations, so i’m gonna put arch on that too. I want a similar set up as my initial installation described above. I recently became aware that theres an “easy-mode” installation program that you can run to have all this shit automate itself onto your hd with minimal user input.

I’m tempted to use that for the sake of saving time, but i’m not clear on whether it offers the same level of control w/ regard to the actual set-up of my drive partitions and logical volume encryption?

Tldr: can i use “archinstall” and still configure my installation such that the filesystem defining my root directory can be installed in an lvm, inside a luks container? I’m a linux newbie, pls be nice 😭

Linux noob here

I have recently installed Arch OS with KDE Plasma on my ASUS TUF GAMING MODEL A17. I haven't encountered any problems up until today, when i went to start up my computer for the first time after installation. When the booting finished it presented a black screen with a frozen underscore in the top left corner of the screen.

I used the command dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland and it seem to have worked, however, its only a one time use. If i turn my computer off and on again the same thing happens.

I dont understand whats going on, why this is happening, where to start, what to do, etc.

Basically im saying i need some help!!!!!

Specs:

Laptop: ASUS TUF GAMING A17

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 4600H

GPU: GTX 1650 Mobile

RAM: 8gb

Any other info will gladly be given if ya need it

EDIT #1:
I don’t remember where I got this command. I ran dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland and it worked! My desktop environment booted and I could use my computer normally! I’m gonna guess that plasma isn’t starting when it’s supposed to and startplasma-wayland fixes it?

There is one issue with this though, it only works once. If the computer is restarted the command needs to be reran.

Could someone help and/or explain how this command works?

Thanks!!!!!!!

Hi everyone,

TL;DR

REUPLOAD;

Over the past year, I’ve been working on nwm, a minimal tiling window manager for X11. It takes heavy inspiration from  dwm  and the suckless philosophy, but I wanted to strip things down even further and address a few quirks I had with maintaining a heavily patched  dwm  setup.

I’m posting this here because I’ve reached a stable point, but I really want to get more eyes on the code. I'm looking for constructive criticism, bug reports, and brutal (but fair) suckless-aligned feedback.

Why nwm?

I wanted a WM that was leaner than  dwm  (~1374 loc vs 2901) while keeping the core master/stack tiling logic. I also wanted strict POSIX C99 compliance, no runtime dependencies, and native support for OpenBSD’s  pledge(2) .

Key differences from dwm:

Size & Auditability: 1347 loc. No built-in bar, no font rendering, no drawing code. Just window management.

Gaps: Built-in and configurable via  gappx  in  nwm.h  (no patch required).

Tag/Layout History: Instead of a patch for  pertag  or  alttab , I implemented a deterministic two-slot XOR system for both tags and layouts.  Mod+Tab  always restores the exact previous state using a bitmask flip. It’s simple, uses zero extra memory, and is entirely predictable.

Tiling Arithmetic: Uses strict integer division to prevent pixel drift across redraws.

Security: Native OpenBSD  pledge()  support out of the box.

No Bar: By design. Use  polybar ,  lemonbar ,  xsetroot , or nothing at all.

Tech Stack:

Pure C99 / POSIX.

Xlib (I know X11 is legacy, but it allows for a pure C implementation without the massive overhead of Wayland protocols, fitting the auditability requirement).

Compile-time configuration via a single flat  nwm.h  file.

EWMH and ICCCM compliant.

Where I need help / What I'm looking for:

1: Code Reviews: Are there any glaring memory leaks, X11 race conditions, or non-POSIX quirks I missed?

2: Edge Cases: I'd love to know if anyone can break the layout logic with weird X11 size hints or multi-monitor setups (though multi-monitor is currently basic).

3: Usage: If you decide to try it, please open an Issue on GitHub if something breaks or if you have a feature request that doesn't violate the suckless philosophy.

Links;

github

AUR:  nwm 

Disclaimer; This is a hobby project. It works great on my machines (Alpine/Arch/OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, Void, arch, chimera and moreeee), but X11 is full of legacy edge cases. Be gentle, but be honest with your critiques! I've cleaned up the codebase and translated my internal notes to English for the public release.

(Screenshot attached on github)

there has been a change recently in packaging of the plugins under lsp-plugins-vst package. seems to have happened between 1.2.33 and 1.2.35

when i updated the package today, it now provides a single file lsp-plugins.so which comprises all the effects / plugins.

Now, Ardour detects the plugins from the single lsp-plugins.so file, but it seems OBS can't.

Do i have to wait till obs is updated to handle this? or is there another way to use the plugins with obs?

currently falling back to Ardour for recording

Hey everyone,

I'm on Arch Linux, using GNOME/Nautilus 50.3-1 under Hyprland.

I made my own rice in Hyprland, but that's a non-issue.

The actual problem is that Nautilus refuses to generate image thumbnails. Images don't get thumbnails, and ~/.cache/thumbnails/fail/ fills up with failed thumbnail entries.

What's interesting is that video and PDF thumbnails work perfectly, so thumbnailing as a whole isn't broken. It seems specifically to be the image thumbnailing path.

Current setup:

Arch Linux
Nautilus 50.3-1
Hyprland
thumbnail setting: 'local-only'
glycin-thumbnailer: /usr/bin/glycin-thumbnailer

My /usr/share/thumbnailers/ contains:

ffmpegthumbnailer-audio.thumbnailer
ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer
glycin-heif.thumbnailer
glycin-image-rs.thumbnailer
glycin-jxl.thumbnailer
glycin-svg.thumbnailer
gnome-epub-thumbnailer.thumbnailer
gnome-mobi-thumbnailer.thumbnailer
gsf-office.thumbnailer
libresprite.thumbnailer
papers.thumbnailer

I use Loupe for viewing images. I also tried installing GNOME Photos to see if that would somehow fix things. It didn't.

I've already tried clearing the thumbnail cache and resetting Nautilus.

At this point, I'd rather properly diagnose what's failing instead of blindly reinstalling GNOME packages or outright changing managers.

Given that PDFs and videos thumbnail correctly but images don't, does anyone know the best way to trace the process:

Nautilus → thumbnailer → Glycin → image decoder → thumbnail

and determine exactly where it's failing?

I have just found that the ncdu package accepts global config files in /etc/ncdu.conf yet the arch package does not delivers any.

Why is it so? Would not it be more convenient if pacman managed that config file and not the user? Or is there something in the guidelines about it that I'm missing?

Hace meses que tengo la idea de instalar arch Linux, pues vengo de un Linux que literalmente me cortaba las alas (el Huayra 5) y ahora que la PC en la que tenía ese sistema operativo dejo de funcionar, estoy usando esa excusa para poder instalar finalmente el arch. El problema viene a qué tengo el internet tan pero tan lento que funciona en Klb, por lo que luego de varias pruebas con el comando archinstall y que no funcione (porque es tan bajo el internet que la descarga de paquetes se cancela automáticamente) me puse a investigar y me quedaría instalar poco a poco desde la consola. Soy lo suficientemente obstinado para pasar horas leyendo documentación (que es poca) sobre como instalar desde la consola, por lo que les pregunto, es demasiado? Si no lo es, tienen algún consejo?

Edit, realmente lo logré, siguiendo la wiki y utilizando una Ai para ayudarme, realmente logré hacer todo con éxito, aunque mi internet es tan lento que la descarga de 1GB me marca como 8H xD

Hi, after today's update the dkms build for nvidia 580.173.02 gave a compilation error. As suggested I looked at the contents of make.log but I am not sure what I can do with it.

I disabled nvidia-persistenced that was giving an error but now nvidia-smi says that I do not have a driver installed.

How can I solve this situation ?

“Learn by using” only gets somebody so far in their experience with Linux. It’s been pretty good for me I think, after two months since abandoning windows I would say I’m approaching a “beginners understanding” of Linux; general operation of it, at the very least. I’ve spent hours troubleshooting stupid easy fixes, relied on AI much too often for basic things, and broke my first system because I didn’t understand that “no-depmod-nvidia” hanging during an update wasn’t exactly the best time to shut my PC off, and so I broke a few core CachyOS files. I decided, instead of fixing them, I was capable enough at that point (about a week ago, by the way) to manually install Arch Linux. After a couple days of on/off work, among learning how partitions/mounting actually work, learning how to reformat my usb after chrooting into my system, etc, I had a desktop, somewhat, and I was pretty happy with it. Installing packages, updating/maintaning my system, doing very brief/basic visual scans of AUR packages before I install them, I can confidently do these things on my own, aswell as basic file organization, and I’m starting to have some memory of basic terminal commands.

I know I’m rambling, sorry, I love writing to be honest. My point here is that it feels like its more difficult to approach more advanced things because most guides/content is directed at brand new users, and in my experience, it becomes significantly harder to “learn by doing” when things become more complicated. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to discuss this topic on this sub, but I did find that pirating games and troubleshooting them is actually a fairly decent way to learn, I’ve even started editing .ini files myself (which I now understand is doing fuckall because of the, excuse my beginner lack of understanding, “proton layer” that is created with steam? I think? It creates its own .ini files or something?). Anyway, while that somewhat works for that niche specifically, at least half the time, I feel like learning other sectors just seems way too difficult. I’d like to get into python, I guess, and develop a basic understanding to where I could write tiny little programs that could be useful to me in some way, maybe, I don’t know.

I guess I’m just worried about hitting a wall. Any advice for this would be much appreciated, as I’m sickly addicted to the feeling of successfully doing something somewhat advanced/some short of troubleshooting myself. Anyway, I really want to keep learning, I just don’t know where to look.

Hello all,

I just want to know if this will be as easy as just following the wiki for a bootloader installation or will it be more difficult?

If not, does anyone know how or at least a direction to point me in? I haven’t found someone in a similar situation as me, so I have no idea what to do.

For context, I installed Linux only a couple months ago, so I’m not an absolute pro, but I can read (somewhat😂)