My experience of trying out difference Linux distributions over the years has made me want to document everything I have done to make a new installation as usable as possible. This was the first time that I tried a hands-on/ minimal distribution like Arch and committed to using it as a daily-driver for my work.

This here is a collection of every issue that I found interesting and worth talking about. This is not meant to (nor can it ever) replace the official Arch Wiki in any way. I just sometimes found myself scouring the Internet to find answers to some of the more weirder issues and this is an attempt to gather all that information in one place.

Setup

• Device: Dell XPS-15 9570
• OS: Arch Linux (Kernel 6.14)
• Window Manager: i3 (X11)

Troubleshooting

Update pacman package installation mirrors

I needed to do this in 2 main situations:

• When a new Arch Installation occurs and one needs to fetch the latest mirrors before performing any package downloads/ system upgrades.
• Sometimes packages would fail to install due to the download URLs returning a "404"

sudo reflector --verbose --latest 5 --country <country> --age 6 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

• Finally, sync databases/ perform a system upgrade with yay -Syyu

Delete yay and pacman generated artifacts

• pacman and yay don't clear cache by default and can store many old versions of packages:
  • yay -Ps to get the status of installed packages and cache disk space usage
  • yay -Yc removes unused dependencies
  • yay -Sc aggressively cleans cache for both aur and pacman packages
• For an intelligent/ less-aggressive solution:
  1. sudo pacman -S pacman-contrib to get paccache utility
  2. paccache -d to dryrun a cache purge
  3. paccache -r to delete old cache (saving last 3 versions by default)
  4. Can be set-up as a hook that runs on every pacman transaction

Control media playback via keyboard

• Get the playerctl package
• playerctl next, playerctl previous, playerctl play-pause will control playback
• If you use Xorg, XF86AudioNext, XF86AudioPrev, XF86AudioPlay keys can then be bound to the above commands to control playback via keyboard

Improve microphone audio quality

While my laptop microphone would sound clear, I found it to be super sensitive in most situations - picking up a lot of background noise and making it borderline unusable. I installed and started using this noise suppression config after a suggestion from Reddit and I have had a much better experience ever since.

Stop Discord/ Zoom/ Meet from changing microphone gain

It took me ages to figure out why my microphone volume kept getting changed without my knowledge, causing my voice to either disappear completely or become way too loud and distorted. This made it impossible for me to take any meetings or calls on linux without using earphones that had built-in microphone.

Turns out, WebRTC (the protocol that all of these voice/ video conferencing apps use) allows applications to automatically control the mic gain. Fortunately, we can toggle AGC (Automatic Gain Control) off in some applications individually, as well as tell our audio server (PipeWire in my case) to block AGC changes by any of these applications:

• Disable audio post-processing in Firefox
• Disable automatic volume adjustment in Zoom:
  1. Goto Zoom -> Settings -> Audio
  2. In the Microphone section, unselect "Automatically adjust microphone volume"
• Disable automatic gain control in Discord:
  1. Goto Discord -> Settings -> Voice and Video
  2. Under Voice Processing, toggle off "Automatic Gain Control"
• Lastly, I added a rule in PipeWire (Under pulse.rules in .config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/pipewire-pulse.conf) to block changes to the Input Source volume. The exact commit with this change be found in my dotfiles here

  {
      matches = [
          { application.process.binary = "Discord" }
          { application.process.binary = "chrome" }
          { application.process.binary = "firefox" }
      ]
      actions = { quirks = [ block-source-volume ] }
  }
  

autorandr fails to move all windows and switch to a single-display setup on unplugging an external display

Using xrandr every single time you connect or disconnect an external display can be very annoying. autorandr saves your display config in a profile and also automatically switches to it when you connect to it.

However, I found that disconnecting my display did not make it automatically switch back to a single-display setup. This would result in a ghost i3 desktop to exist, even if I moved all my windows back to my single laptop display.

Turns out, this was because once you disconnect your external display, autorandr tries to find a saved profile matching the config of just your single-display setup. So a neat little trick to fix this is to create a new profile in autorandr with just your laptop display. This way when you disconnect the external display, autorandr is always able to find a config to fall back to.

Wi-fi drops connection intermittently

Another issue that plagued me for the longest time was my inconsistent wi-fi connection.

At the time of installing Arch, I had set up my wi-fi via iwd. Some time in the future, I also ended up installing wpa_supplicant and dhcpd (for DHCP). And then someone on the internet said that NetworkManager is the best so I ended up installing that too. And soon after, I started experiencing connection drops.

What I didn't understand then was the fact that iwd, wpa_supplicant and dhcpd were all separate backends to authenticate and connect to wireless networks. And since all of them did the same thing at the same time, it was causing a race condition - with the dormant one trying to replace the active one.NetworkManager on the other hand was a client that would use either wpa_supplicant or iwd as one of the backends to connect to a network. It also had the most amount of features/ support built-in (one wouldn't need to install dhcpd separately to enable DHCP for example. You could enable it throught NetworkManager itself). This table is pretty useful in understanding the differences between all of them.

Therefore, I needed to decide a client that I would use to connect to a network and a backend that would then handle the connection.

So I ended up going with NetworkManager + iwd combo. I uninstalled wpa_supplicant and dhcpd, making sure to move any custom network configuration over to iwd. And from then on, I strictly used NetworkManager to connect to all wi-fi networks and voila, no connection drops ever.

Changing regions does not automatically update the Time Zone

I was visiting my home country some time back and was not happy to find out that my PC's time did not automatically update. One would ideally want their computer to be able to figure out where you are (when it connects to the internet) and update the time according to your timezone.

NetworkManager allows you to dispatch scripts based on when, where or which network you connect to. So I found someone who was kind enough to already have made such a script. I placed it in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d and made sure the dispatcher service was running and enabled on system startup:

#!/bin/bash
iface=$1
action=$2

if [[ $iface != lo && $action == up ]]; then
    tz=$(tzupdate -s 1 -p 2>/dev/null)
    if [[ -n $tz && -r /usr/share/zoneinfo/$tz ]]; then
        timedatectl set-timezone $tz
    fi
fi

Arch wiki also suggests an alternate script to do this.