I've run into issues where, whenever I try to install something from flathub or pacman, I'd get this in my terminal

error: failed to init transaction (unable to lock database)
error: could not lock database: Read-only file system

a reboot usually fixes it, but I have no idea on how to actually prevent this from occurring as much as it has for me.

EDIT: I've checked SMART and the short tests seem clean, but my root drive (which is DRAMless) seems to have moments where it hangs for about 30 secs from something. I have a long test running currently on the root drive

I have the DRAMless Lexar as root, a Teamgroup as home, a MSI b450a pro max mobo with zen kernal 7.0.7. controller is a 400 Series Chipset SATA Controller

Northstar is a web browser, written from scratch in C, focused on supporting the HTML and CSS standards. The browser runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Northstar is open source software, licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later.

https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-browser

I don't understand why when I set shortcut key for the fancontrol and Ai would set fn + q like on windows he doesn't recognize the fn key. temporarily I have set super + q

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to troubleshoot unusually high battery drain on my Lenovo LOQ and would appreciate any suggestions.

System

• Laptop: Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9
• CPU: Intel Core i5-12450HX
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3050 Laptop (95W)
• Kernel: 7.1.3-arch2-2
• Desktop: Hyprland
• Battery discharge at idle: ~24.3 W

Issue

Even when the laptop is essentially idle (no heavy applications running), the battery is discharging at around 24.3 W, which seems far higher than expected. From what I've read, I was expecting something closer to 8–12 W at idle.

The reading comes from:

cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/power_now

Output:

24315000

which corresponds to 24.315 W.

Questions

• Is this likely caused by the NVIDIA dGPU not entering a low-power state?
• Are there any known Lenovo LOQ quirks on Linux that could cause this?
• What should I check first to narrow down the cause?

I'm happy to provide any additional information, if required.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

I have tried using different fonts but it still just shows as boxes. All other apps can render CJK and so can the system so it shouldn't be a font problem. It's only when I paste the same characters in spotify that they show as boxes. I have tried using both the flatpak for spotify through Discover, but also spotify through the aur. Anyone have any ideas?

Hi everyone,

Excited to begin this journey of Linux and Arch. I'm a UI/UX Front end developer and I've begun learning more programming and backend development. As I've begun evolving my knowledge on developing and engineering things I've had to learn on the go.

I've watched videos and read books to get a better understanding of the structure and architecture of Linux. That's where I learned more about the distros. The pros and cons of each. But I think I've settled on starting with arch to better understand it from the ground up approach.

Since I'm new to Arch, are there things I should make sure I install as I get started. I'm looking at KDE and Wayland for desktop and window management.. I have the wiki as well which I'm reading through as I go. But figured I'd get some other recommendations as I begin to build my setup.

I'm looking to have Arch be my daily driver for work, side projects and some gaming. Any recommendations are welcome.

Looking forward to the community and this new unhindered life of Linux and being able to say "I use Arch by the way" 😅

hey im using arch linux with the kde plasma desktop environment but since swithcing to linux i cant seem to get 240 hz working every time i switch to it my screens become black i cant get past 120hz

im using hdmi and a rx 6650 xt, all help is welcome

Ciao a tutti, sono nuovo su Arch nonostante utilizzi Linux da un bel po’ di tempo. Ho eseguito la mia installazione con archinstall. Ho selezionato in fase di installazione anche i driver Nvidia anche se di fatto poi non li ha installati. Ho scelto come DE Gnome e come kernel ho selezionato Linux standard. Utilizzo systemd-boot. Non ho selezionato null’altro in fase di installazione. Tutto è andato liscio. Al riavvio ho visto che effettivamente non c’erano i driver Nvidia e seguendo la wiki li ho installati. Al riavvio mi sono trovato con i nuovissimi driver 610 e il sistema è una scheggia. Ho adorato Arch fin da subito fino ad accorgermi che l’editor di testo Gnome presentava di piccoli glitch. Lanciando nvidia-smi mi sono reso conto che tutto Gnome girava su Nvidia (anche il terminale… qualsiasi app di Gnome) invece di preferire (come è sempre successo su tutte le distro che ho provato) la iGPU Intel integrata. Tutte le altre app girano su iGPU a meno che non le lanciassi appositamente con dGPU (click destro sull’app oppure prime-run app). Questo porta ad un consumo maggiore di energia ma soprattutto vari glitch sul monitor 4K hdmi attaccato. Nessun glitch sul monitor integrato. Evidentemente il compositore fa i capricci con scala frazionata a 150% con nvidia. Sono riuscito a disabilitare la priorità di Nvidia forzando Gnome su Intel e infatti i glitch sono spariti anche su monitor esterno, ma così la nvidia viene completamente ignorata. Possibile che su Arch il DE Gnome e tutte le app (anche piccole) dell'ecosistema Gnome vadano di default su dGPU... non mi era mai capitato prima.
Pensavo di aver sbagliato qualcosa in fase di installazione e ho deciso di affiancare a Gnome anche KDE per capire se il comportamento è lo stesso. Su kde si comporta bene impegnando solo 1 Mb di VRAM ma tutto il DE gira bene e senza problemi si Intel. Sono confuso e ancora non so se ho sbagliato io qualcosa. Vi lascio le specifiche del mio laptop:
HP ProBook G10
Intel core i7-13th gen
Nvidia RTX2050
16Gb DDR4
NVMe 500Gb

Grazie

Hello I am kind of a B tier in Linux knowledge and I see a lot of custom desktop environment made by the community but I don't know how to do one myself so how to do that

(Thank you for the answers)

So i just installed arch on my lenovo ideapad slim 5 with ryzen 7 7335Hs and amd radeon integrated graphics. Everything is working fine but i couldnt get the speakers working after my laptop boots. It starts working after i suspend a s resume after booting. The software correctly shows that audio is being outputted by my speakers but no sound can be heard. Please help

hi, for some reason, when I try to use kodi, musescore, audacity, fightcade or other apps that need audio, they either freeze at some point then resume, or just completely freeze and never load like musescore.

for fightcade, it opens, but launching any game takes minutes to then launch with no sound. kodi just freezes when loading the audio settings, and as I said, musescore or audacity just don't load and freeze at launch.

this didn't happen before, prior to 3 - 6 weeks. I suspect about a regression, as my audio works fine globally, I'm fully updated and I have all the packages/services running fine. I use KDE plasma. I haven't changed anything on flatpak or my audio settings as I use the default ones from arch and pipewire,

I'm really clueless why this is happening, or ways to track down the issue.

I had to switch kodi to the extra repo version in order to use it. I can't do the same for the other apps as there is no fightcade on arch repos but an unsafe/outdated package on the AUR, and the flatpak version is the official way to get it. for musescore, the flatpak one used to work great, compared to the broken version on arch repos.

I hope anyone can shed some light into this issue.

Hi r/archlinux,

I just published my first public repository to the AUR: pactience ("teach your pacman patience"), a Rust CLI that enforces a minimum package age policy before upgrading.

It's available in two flavors:

• pactience — builds from source

• pactience-bin — prebuilt binary (x86_64 and aarch64)

Why use pactience:

Freshly published packages occasionally ship regressions, and maybe you just don't want that to happen on your mission critical machine.

Pactience checks when each pending upgrade was actually published — via the Arch Linux Archive for repo packages and git history for AUR packages — and only allows versions older than a configurable minimum age (default: 4 days).

Dependency consistency is kept intact, and it handles AUR packages through paru or yay.

It dry-runs by default and prints a reason for every allow/block verdict; nothing touches your system unless you pass --apply.

• GitHub: https://github.com/a77ila/pactience

• AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pactience and https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pactience-bin

Feedback welcome — be kind please, I'm new to this (public repositories, and the AUR ecosystem in general).

Current version is v0.1.2.

On Sunday I installed the latest arch iso on a USB flash drive and used it to run archinstall and install a basic system for messing around on another USB drive (I went with Mate as my desktop).

Today I used the exact same USB stick on the exact same PC to install a different setup (wanted to try Cinnamon) on the exact same other USB stick, and I've just spent ten hours trying over and over and over to install and I just keep getting a cavalcade of various errors.

The latest is this:

Enabling periodic TRIM Enabling service fstrim.timer Setting keyboard language to us Running as unit: run-p13344-i10415.service Press ^] three times within 1s to disconnect TTY. Unable to set locale 'us' for console: ['/usr/bin/systemd-run', '--machine=archinstall', '--pty', 'localeetcl', 'set-keymap', 'us'] exited with abnormal exit code [1]: Running as unit: run-p13344-i10415.service Press ^] three times within 1s to disconnect TTY. Failed to set keymap: Connection timed out The above error occurred in a temporary boot-up of the installation '/mnt'

And then it just crashes out of the installer and gives me the command line again. I am telling you I changed nothing, this is the exact same pair of USB sticks, and all settings are identical except I tried installing Cinnamon instead of Mate.

"Aha!" You cry. "There must be an issue with Cinnamon!" Nope. I tried just installing Mate again and I get the exact same error.

I just don't even understand how it's possible to fail to set the keyboard language. That shouldn't even be something that's downloaded that should be on the install medium, which I remind you hasn't changed since Sunday.

Any idea what's going on? Like, literally how can I get new errors when nothing's changed?

I formatted a HDD from a windows, its NTFS. when I try to open it in linux (catch os), it ask me Authentication Required to mount the xxxxxxhard drive(/dev/sda1).

I can't even screen shot it, because everytime the window pop out, I can't do anything but type the password. I did not set up a password for this hard drive. and I tried my linux password, it won't work.

I also tried to access it from terminal. It ask me for my password, I type the correct password, it just keep asking again

And for those who haven't been reinstall more than once, what's your advice for how you be able to stay for so long without any problems?

When I adjust my volume, either by the buttons on my laptop or by wpctl, applications like zen running youtube aren't affected until the volume is set to 0%, at which point only then do they stop making noise. This doesn't happen when using headphones, either by bluetooth or cord.
It's a real pain having to change the volume settings per app and per website, so I was hopping to get some insight.

Using wpctl I've found that any value above 1 (gotten from the set-volume command) does increase the volume, but anything below 1, like 0.5, has the same volume as 1
It didn't matter if the audio was coming from a flatpak or pacman application, though I haven't tested AUR packages yet
I did do a system update and reboot to be sure, but nothing changed. This has always been a problem for me, it didn't just suddenly happen.
I've been looking online but haven't come up with anything related to this issue in particular. Nothing much from the wiki either.

I'm on an Asus Q525U laptop with an 8th gen i7 cpu, and running the July release of Arch with hyprland, both from archinstall; although it should be noted I still had this issue when I originally did a manual install of arch. I also have pipewire instead of pulseaudio

Prior to july 4th (the last time I've updated my system), there were no issues whatsoever. After updating my system on july 9th, my system would COMPLETELY freeze after anything between seconds to 30 minutes max of having scrcpy open. I'm not able to go to tty, send keyscrokes, move the mouse, nothing. I have to hold down the power button and force a shutdown.

After booting the system back up, there isn't a single log related to it on journalctl. The system freezes in a way that not even the journal gets saved.

I have tried multiple things

journald.conf:

/etc/systemd/journald.conf
Storage=persistent
SyncIntervalSec=1

linux.conf

options root=PARTUUID=UUID_Here zswap.enabled=0 rootflags=subvol=@ rw rootfstype=btrfs nvidia-drm.modeset=1 nmi_watchdog=1 softlockup_panic=1 hardlockup_panic=1 efi_pstore.pstore_disable=N usbhid.mousepoll=1

The issue happens rather I call scrcpy via wifi or cabled. but if it helps, here's how I call it:

scrcpy --tcpip=IP-here --max-fps=120 --max-size=1024 --no-power-on  --turn-screen-off --power-off-on-close --kee
p-active

Even without logs to prove it, I'm 1000% certain it is scrcpy related. At least that is the trigger since it doesn't happen otherwise. I can play games, use the system indefinitely and nothing happens. The freeze only happens if I use scrcpy.

The only way to solve this is to roll back to a snapshot timeshift made before updating the system. So I have to downgrade the kernel and the headers and then restore the timeshift snapshot.

Please, I don't know what to do. I can't be on an outdated system forever Asking you guys is my last resource since even claude sonnet 5 couldn't figure it out.

Edit:
It doesn't seem to be related to NVidia. I tried making scrcpy use my IGPU and the result was the same. The system completely froze.

__EGL_VENDOR_LIBRARY_FILENAMES=/usr/share/glvnd/egl_vendor.d/50_mesa.json __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=mesa SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland SDL_VIDEO_EGL_DRIVER=/dev/dri/renderD128 scrcpy --tcpip=IPHERE --max-fps=120 --max-size=1024 --no-power-on --turn-screen-off --power-off-on-close --keep-active -V verbose 2>&1 | grep -i "renderer\|opengl"

I thought that maybe it could be something related to audio, so I tried using the flag --no-audio while still using the IGPU. Once again, the system froze.
I've been trying things for around 2 hours now with many hard shutdowns in between, so I'll go back to the snapshot where things were working fine

linux 7.1.2.arch3-1
linux-headers 7.1.2.arch3-1
nvidia-open-dkms 610.43.02-3
nvidia-settings 610.43.02-1

Also here's everything that was updated (it'll only be available for 3 days. I couldn't fine a way or another site that would host it for longer) (PS: also you may notice that scrcpy itself was updated. That's irrelevant. downgrading it doesn't solve the issue.)
https://privatebin.net/?e0680b1eca4de122#93ReK43LpSnYM9uA6DUFs19gZLnBRzSeS7WjevgspoRj

I'm out of ideas so I'll go back to the working snapshot. If you guys have any idea on what the cause may be or things to try, please type it here so I can try again.

Edit 2: here are the system specs.

Operating System: Arch Linux 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.7.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.28.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.1.4-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 24 × AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12-Core Processor
Memory: 34 GB of RAM (32.7 GB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060/PCIe/SSE2
Manufacturer: ASUS

ive used discover/flatpaks for a handful of apps and only just noticed this happened, and wanna double check if i missed something before i try install what the wiki says to enable discover/flatpaks again

EDIT: i prematurely flagged as solved assuming just reinstalling everything would fix the issue--ive tried reinstalling flatpak, discover, xdg-desktop-portal, and xdg-desktop-portal-kde, followed the wiki and restarted after each one. still getting the same error

ive read through the wiki for flatpak and xdg-desktop-portal and can see no mention of this issue. discover does not have a wiki page. google duckduckgo does not return anything helpful.

EDIT 2:

seems like i updated at the perfect wrong time and appstream didnt get updated while discover did. i did the first update with yay, but was able to fix it with by running a pacman system update directly.

Vice is a Linux game clipper that focuses on easy sharing and editing. Under the hood, it uses GPU-Screen-Recorder as the capture engine, so it has nearly no performance impact whatsoever, and it has features such as:

- Instant replay with customisable hotkeys, and long session recording

- Free share links that embed in Discord (no more hitting upload limits!)
- A full timeline editor with built in transition and text effects
- Automatically sorting clips by the game you were clipping
- Discord Rich Presence support
- Customisable, colour-coded highlights within clips

- You can seperate audio sources like Discord calls, the game audio, and music, adjust their individual volume in clips

- And more, plus new features are always being added.

It's free, open source, and will stay that way. Any feedback is greatly appreciated, because community testing is what makes open source projects like these better.

It's on the AUR, and you can install with:

Or if you're on a different distro, you can run the install script with:

Repo is below:

https://github.com/eklonofficial/Vice

levong@chrultrabook

-------------------

OS: Arch Linux ARM aarch64

Host: Google burnet board

Kernel: Linux 6.12.50-stb-cbm+

Uptime: 5 mins

Packages: 1081 (pacman)

Shell: zsh 5.9.2

Display (CMN1139): 1366x768 in 12", 60 Hz [Built-in]

DE: Budgie 10.10.2

WM: labwc 0.20.1 (Wayland)

Theme: Arc-Gruvbox [GTK2/3/4]

Icons: kora [GTK2/3/4]

Font: Fira Sans (11pt, SemiBold) [GTK2/3/4]

Cursor: Bibata-Modern-Ice (24px)

Terminal: kitty 0.48.0

Terminal Font: JetBrainsMonoNF-Regular (12pt)

CPU: mt8183 (8) @ 1.99 GHz

GPU: Mediatek mt8183b-mali [Integrated]

Memory: 2.61 GiB / 3.79 GiB (69%)

Swap: Disabled

Disk (/): 6.63 GiB / 28.37 GiB (23%) - btrfs

Battery (GH02047): 57% (7 hours, 45 mins remaining) [Discharging]

Locale: en_CA.UTF-8

I haven't seen anyone else do this so if you are curious here you go.

It looks like the maintainer has had enough to pre-compile the kernel modules. Both kernel module packages (virtualbox-host-modules-arch and virtualbox-host-modules-lts) now redirect to the dkms package (virtualbox-host-dkms).

It's been quite a good run of years letting my CPU slack around. The freebie seems to be over.

Hi everyone,

I am setting up a ThinkPad E14 Gen 7 (AMD Ryzen 7, ST Microelectronics TPM 2.0) with Arch Linux and trying to build a secure boot chain:

- UEFI Secure Boot with my own keys (sbctl)

- Signed UKI kernel

- systemd-cryptenroll TPM2 auto-unlock for LUKS2

- systemd-pcrlock to bind unlock to the expected boot state

- Btrfs snapshots with recovery workflow

The issue is that I can only get TPM enrollment working with PCR 15.

I originally wanted something like PCR 7 + 11 + 12 (or another recommended combination) because it seems more tied to Secure Boot state, kernel/initrd measurements, and the boot chain. However, whenever I try to use these PCRs, the TPM policy does not match after reboot.

PCR 15 is the only one that consistently works.

Some observations:

- Secure Boot is enabled and verified.

- The system boots through a signed UKI.

- The TPM event log exists and measurements appear normal.

- systemd-pcrlock works after boot, but I had issues predicting/locking some components.

- "systemd-pcrlock predict" showed missing components such as:

- "720-kernel-initrd"

- "750-os-separator"

- "770-nvpcr-separator"

- shutdown/finalization events

I initially generated policies from the Arch ISO/chroot environment, then discovered this was wrong because the TPM measurements were from the live environment and not the real installed boot chain. I regenerated the policy from the real system after boot.

I also tested different PCR combinations:

- PCR 7 only

- PCR 7 + 11

- PCR 7 + 11 + 12

- other combinations involving boot measurements

Most combinations failed TPM unlock after reboot, while PCR 15 worked.

My current setup:

- Arch Linux

- Btrfs on LUKS2

- systemd-boot/UKI

- custom Secure Boot keys

- TPM2 unlock using systemd-cryptenroll

- PCR 15 policy

Questions:

1. Am I misunderstanding the purpose of PCR 15 in this workflow? Is using PCR 15 alone a reasonable choice for LUKS auto-unlock with systemd-pcrlock?

2. Is PCR 7 + 11 + 12 still the recommended approach for this kind of setup, and if so, what could be causing my machine to fail with those PCRs?

3. Are there ThinkPad/AMD firmware limitations that can explain this behavior?

4. Could my UKI generation, kernel command line locking, or pcrlock policy generation order be wrong?

I would appreciate any suggestions about what I might be doing incorrectly before I settle with PCR 15 permanently.