r/archlinux

My prior experience has only been with Mint, and I really enjoyed it. However, being on Linux, I really wanted to embrace the customization that comes with it. Through my research, I've become really eager to learn Arch, specifically with Hyprland as my WM. I really see the appeal of that kind of work flow, and I love the idea of building up own desktop environment.

I have my system dual booted currently now with Windows and Arch. I've made a conscious effort to read the wiki thoroughly and not use ArchInstall so I actually learn. There were still some confusing parts I didn't understand, so I turned to Youtube guides (which is how I've taught myself most things prior). I still tried my best to take the time and understand why they are doing those things, but everyone seems to do things differently. In the end, I still got Arch installed, but I'm by no means comfortable with the system yet.

Now entering Hyprland, is where I get really confused. I try and use the wiki, but the wiki isn't exactly clear to me as a beginner. There's a lot of commands that either don't work for me, or are not explicitly written that are confusing for me to execute. I thought I could turn to YouTube but again, everyone does things so vastly different, and no one really explains why. Someone urges using yay over pacman, someone says to switch from bash to Zsh, this way is better than this way, etc. Hyprland now also uses lua files instead of conf, which I don't understand the difference between or how that effects things.

How do you guys recommend I go about actually learning this distro and WM. I don't want to just steal someones setup, and I also don't want to use AI either. Maybe I'm not looking in the wiki correctly, but they seem to confuse me more than help. I know I'm new and in over my head a bit, but I want to actually learn this system and I am more than willing to put in that time and effort, I just feel lost on how to do that currently.

I have switched back and forth from linux distros and windows for quite some time by now and I think that I would like to switch to Arch. The main reason is that I want to learn more about how Linux works, etc. I usually let my younger brother play on my PC and it makes me wonder whether he could use it.

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

  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.

The Arch installation guide mentions disabling Secure Boot. I recently learnt that Secure Boot can work with Arch.

My questions are: does this make sense?

Should I keep it enabled after all (is it risky if not)?

Is there a risk that, following an update, Secure Boot will reject my kernel or boot loader?

Did you enable SB?

Hello. I just installed the tagstudio AUR package https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tagstudio and found that it would not run (I was having the same issue that is already noted by Iiridayn on the comment section of this package) and I wanted to leave a comment because I figured out which package solves this issue.

Specifically, installing qt6-webengine solved the issue and allowed the program to start. I wanted to comment this so that the maintainer can add it to the list, but I don't have an account and I can't create one, so I'm not sure how to let them know. I was frankly hoping someone here would be able to make the comment on my behalf so that this can be fixed.