some unlucky Arch Linux defaults

24 March, 2025 - Categories: linux

I love Arch Linux - it's an amazing disto with many advantages, I'll have to write a dedicated blog post about why I use it and think it's great.

However, following their policy of "keep as close to upstream as possible" leads to some unlucky defaults which I imagine most people would prefer changed.

Note that this list is incomplete - I'm using this blog post as a bit of a reminder to keep track of things for myself. I use Arch Linux on at least 3 devices at any time, and sometimes I forget to do these quick fixes on one or the other.

The order might be random, let's just start with something I dealt with today:

rtkit log spam - when using xdg desktop portal to enable screen capture (for screen sharing in calls), rtkit is used to give priority to audio/video streaming applications, ideally leading to a smoother streaming experience. however, the current version of rtkit prints debug messages, spamming systemd logs with lines such as: rtkit-daemon[892]: Supervising 4 threads of 2 processes of 1 users.

to disable it, i used systemctl edit rtkit-daemon.service and added the following: [Service] LogLevelMax=3

which created a file /etc/systemd/system/rtkit-daemon.service.d/override.conf with these contents. reloading and restarting rtkit stopped the spam. There is several issues and pull requests on the heftig/rtkit github that change this, but sadly no response.

An older topic, looks like the compression default was made reasonable again, not sure if debug builds and parallel downloads have been added, hopefully they have. https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/pacman/-/issues/23 ( concerns long compression times when making your own packages locally, among other things)

Here's a fun one from today (april 4 2025): using systemd-networkd (don't ask me why... i've had enough issues with systemd-resolved, it's just pure lazyness on my part to give systemd-networkd a chance too) it waits for ALL interfaces to come online - which means the network-online.target NEVER gets reached if, for example, your wired connection is working perfectly fine but your wireless isn't configured. I have to modify the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service to use the --any flag to make it not fuck up. EDIT: should have read the arch wiki.... https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-networkd point 1.2.1 explains it perfectly.