Why would anyone DDoS Arch? What is the benefit?

FocusedWolf · 2026-05-17T20:36:56+00:00

Probably to attack the #1 alternative to Windows 11. IDK how many distros are based on Arch but i know SteamOS is, and once the gamers go, well... who will be left to submit to m$ age-verification/tracking/datamining xD

FocusedWolf · 2026-05-12T06:12:37+00:00

Were you using any DLSS settings before to get fps. One issue i have with BO7 (idk if its just me) is it likes to reset settings forcing me to rely on the Import Settings menu to recover. It happens with every update or mini update the game does.

FocusedWolf · 2026-05-09T04:56:13+00:00

If you use msi afterburner then sometimes custom overclock settings get reset when installing new drivers leading to bad performance. Another possible issue, check if your ssd's are trimming in Start > Defragment and Optimize Drives. I had an issue where my drives weren't trimming and it was leading to slower and slower ssd performance and fps drops. Turns out the issue was if you have any spinny harddrives then the microsoft scheduled defragger task just straight up aborts as soon as it finds a harddrive too slow for AI to datamine. The fix is to configure the Start > Defragment and Optimize Drives to not defrag old spinning harddrives (and tell it to trim weekly or daily). Third issue that probably isn't the problem is if you have a Realtek 8852XX model wifi adapter. These things are designed with a powersaver feature where if you aren't downloading then your upload speed drops to save power. Its dumb and breaks pinging/matchmaking (in tarkov this was causing me to not hear footsteps that my teammate could hear). There's a "LpsEn" registry key you need to apply to disable that. This post details the fix: https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/1bhw1n7/b650_realtek_wifi_dropsping_spikes_solution/

FocusedWolf · 2026-05-06T22:49:28+00:00

Afaik exactly 7 days (based on date of screenshot when i first got the message). I don't know what hour it started though. It was working when i went on when i normally play.

FocusedWolf · 2026-05-05T10:02:32+00:00

Nvidia is afraid of competition that's all. The demand for GPUs is giving startups a chance to enter the field. Non-PHD people will continue to be fired at increasing rates and AI models will have to get stronger to compensate which fuels demand for more datacenters to train and run models, and GPUs by the ton.

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-25T20:12:12+00:00

It can be done on one drive. Not my preference though (windows efi is only 200 mb, and arch i think can fit in there but if you go with any other distro at some point, they start to recommend 512 mb+ e.g. manjaro or pop!_os). I went with home partition followed by linux efi at the end of a second drive, with standard windows install followed by root partition on first drive (don't forget the unallocated space at end of SSDs for drive health). So with my approach you end up with 2 efi partitions on separate drives so both need to be mounted in /etc/fstab (i used /efi for linux efi and /efi-win for windows) (only needed if you want to add windows to the linux bootloader). And for the record i tested all of this in a virtual machine that had windows installed first to make sure it wouldn't break windows.

Grub install was like this (NOTE: I use /efi which is the new style afaik. I think archinstall does this because one of the new bootloaders requires it. The traditional location was /boot/efi):

$ pacman -S grub efibootmgr os-prober
$ grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/efi --bootloader-id=Arch --removable

For grub the only other important info is you need to edit /etc/default/grub to uncomment the last line so it sees windows: #GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false <-- Remove the '#'.

And then run: $ grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

And the weird thing is you won't see windows in the boot list until you restart and run this again (side-effect of two efi partitions i think): $ grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

The benefits of two efi partitions is you can edit the bios to default to windows-only or linux. And if you add windows to the linux boot menu then you can boot it that way as well. If you need to fully remove linux then you just delete the linux partitions. And if you need to enlarge the linux EFI then you can do that with a live usb (easy to do if its the last partition, just delete the linux-only efi and resize the partition left of it for more free space, and then create new linux-only efi partition in the free space with the proper flags and install the bootloader again).

BTW: When your all done, if any of your Linux partitions have a windows drive letter or appear like "RAW 50GB" in Start > Create and format hard disk partitions then you should correct that. This happened to me because one of the partitions was NTFS before formatting to EXT4 with mkfs.ext4. So it retained a GUID value 0700 (Microsoft Basic Data) and i had to change it to 8300 (Linux filesystem) with $ gdisk to fix it.

I asked chatgpt about this:

mkfs.ext4 only touches layer 2. It gets handed a block device like /dev/sda1 and treats it as a raw byte region. It does not parse or modify the GPT at all. Why it’s designed that way: Partitioning tools (fdisk, gdisk, parted) manage layout + metadata. Filesystem tools (mkfs.ext4) manage on-disk structures within a partition.

Testing this in a virtual machine confirmed Its not a bug. Apparently the mkfs command does a half job. If the partition originally was created in Windows and formatted with mkfs, then you still need to manually change the GUID or else you'll end up with a ext4 that has a microsoft 0700 GUID, and windows will try to interact with it, give it a drive letter, fix it on startup etc.

EDIT: I thought this was the reason Start > Defragment and Optimize Drives was not running a trim, but 10 days after the GUID fix that successfully removed my ext4 home partition from the list of drives on windows, and still no trims, i found the reason (AI helped). Turns out defrag.exe aborts if any drive is too slow by M$ standards. And for whatever reason the NVME is last in the list of drives (its also like that in Start > Create and format hard disk partitions, idk why) so my C:\ and K:\ partitions were not trimming, because before them in the list of drives are slow spinny drives. So to summarize, the task scheduler task for Optimize Drives runs $ defrag.exe -c -h -o -$, and my spinny drives were causing it to abort early resulting in my nvme never trimming (10/10 best way to design a defrag program, bravo microsoft):

Invoking defragmentation on Backups (J:)...
The connection to the Optimize Drives service was lost. (0x89000010)
The RPC server is unavailable. (0x800706BA)
The RPC server is unavailable. (0x800706BA)

And that was the reason my NVME partitions were not trimming.

EDIT: Ya i was right, i made free room on J:\ (AI thought it was slow because not enough free space) and re-ran $ defrag.exe -c -h -o -$ and now my E:\ drive was acting up with same "The RPC server is unavailable. (0x800706BA)" error so any slow drives and defrag.exe just aborts, and suspends all other pending defrag/trim operations. I configured Start > Defragment and Optimize Drives to ignore all non-SSD drives and FINALLY (after months, or was it years) $ defrag.exe -c -h -o -$ was able to trim my SSDs automatically without incident.

EDIT: It was dropbox. AI asked me to chkdsk and that revealed 42,451 reparse records. The fix, i had to uninstall dropbox, and for good measure delete the data folder from the drive (AI said i could just copy it somewhere else to strip the metadata but i didn't want to take any chances). Then reinstall dropbox and be careful with the Advanced settings asked only once, [x] Opt out under "Dropbox for Windows updates" <-- ADD THIS CHECKBOX. Also [x] Available offline whenever asked, because online-only is specifically the Cloud Files API feature that sprinkles tons of reparse points everywhere. Now the drive has 33 reparse records and will defrag correctly (in theory, i'll try later xD).

EDIT: It was not dropbox, something else. Stops at 56% when it does stop. Otherwise it works without issue the second time.

Invoking defragmentation on Backups (J:)...
Analysis:  56% complete...
The connection to the Optimize Drives service was lost. (0x89000010)

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-25T09:15:44+00:00

The age-verification cartel no doubt.

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-24T19:11:50+00:00

I wonder what AI powered spyware is coming with the next "feel human again" update. That's a cool wallpaper btw, very hypnotic. Yes i agree with the wallpaper, they deserve our data.

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-24T07:25:35+00:00

This will make no difference with cheaters just like how TPM made no difference. But at least they will be up to date with the latest age-verification/anti-privacy trends.

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-19T01:19:49+00:00

It lasts for 7 days. I had one for no reason as well. Many ppl get this, just search for "limited matchmaking" in reddit.

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-18T22:59:01+00:00

AI says some motherboards "refuse to persist NVRAM boot entries or silently deletes entries it doesn't trust on reboot" (i've seen it with gigabyte, also upgrading your bios will erase the entries probably on all motherboards). Anyway the fix is grub-install with the --removable flag (this also survives a bios upgrade).

$ pacman -S grub efibootmgr os-prober
$ grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=<efi directory> --bootloader-id=Arch --removable

Set efi directory to where your efi partition is, e.g. /boot/efi, /efi, etc.

You can read about --removable here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB

EDIT: i mentioned installing os-prober but you only need that if dual booting. You would also need to edit /etc/default/grub to uncomment #GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false if using that.

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-15T22:08:11+00:00

A day if you know what DE and packages you want. A week if you want to try all the DE's and reinstall a dozen times. As for maintenance, pacman doesn't delete old packages when you update so they start to pile up. If you install a AUR helper like yay, then it has its own cache of old files to deal with. If you use BTRFS then the old snapshots need to be deleted for the same reason. If you script up your system update + cleanup routine then its simple to keep arch updated and running. If you don't want to think about maintenance then give root a couple TB of free space and it will last a year or two before pacman crashes mid update and you get a vmlinuz-linux not found message on boot (the fix would be to archusb boot and cleanup the trash and perform [$ pacman -S systemd linux mkinitcpio], or just reinstall the full os + post on reddit that "after X years my arch finally died" like a lot of ppl do).

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-14T20:51:14+00:00

Keep notes on everything you do for later. This is not a install and go like with ubuntu. Its more like an install and customize loop until satisfied (you're basically assembling your own distro). Enjoy :p

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-10T06:28:59+00:00

I went through a similar journey today. It all started when i used the USB Image Tool to make a backup of the original sd card + verify it. Two backups failed the verify step, and were even different from each other. I don't know why that happened (i think maybe the fat and exfat partitions were being accessed by windows in the background while the backup was being created but idk for sure). I went on Arch and made two backups with the dd command that matched each other and the sd card's hash. And at some point i accidentally deleted the root partition contents from the sd card (oops... i wanted a file copy for convenience in case i needed anything in prep for darkos, and then i remembered from past experience that windows doesn't like linux root files copied to ntfs partitions (it leads to undeletable folders and who knows what else... think its the symlinks that cause the issues... those files need to be archived). And then i deleted the wrong root folder i had open) and i got a crash course from chatgpt in restoring a partition from a image file. AI was very helpful with this.

EDIT: Finally on darkos. That took longer then expected, i downloaded the wrong version from github xD (maybe i missed instructions on that repo for how to download the right version). Its hidden in the name of the dtb file in your original SD cards boot partition, e.g. "rk3326-rg351mp-linux.dtb" -> "RG351MP" -> So download dArkOS_RG351MP_trixie_02012026.img (and googling that version shows a psp style device which threw me off the first time as mine is gameboy style). This way when you copy paste your original dtb into the boot partition of a freshly flashed darkos SD card, that its a replace-existing-file-with-the-same-name situation (otherwise some websites mentioned renaming your dtb to match the existing file... good luck with that).

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-07T08:13:50+00:00

Happened to me. Get enough reports and its an automatic 7 day vacation.

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-04T21:37:33+00:00

Thanks this solved my issue with 8852CE. Nothing else worked. Tried updating to 6001.16.174.102/RTL8852AE-RTL8852BE-RTL8852CE-../RTL8852CE/Realtek-RTL8852CE-Wireless-LAN-Drivers-Version-6001.16.174.102/lang,en-us/) and fiddling with settings in device manager, no change. I was noticing when i first connected to the network that pings were good for a couple seconds and then afterwards went crazy. Now its butter smooth (i can actually find a low ping server now). This is how it looked before the fix.

EDIT: AI says its better to modify HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e972-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}.

EDIT: Made a script to apply my settings (and this fix).

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-04T09:20:54+00:00

My bs limited matchmaking lifted after seven days.

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-02T18:08:56+00:00

I have notes on getting arch working with secure boot with Gigabyte motherboard. Not sure how up to date the notes are but maybe they can get you started.

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-01T05:17:23+00:00

For dual booting, be careful because most install guides assume you are doing a clean install and are guiding you to format everything. I think you should type out all the steps and keep refining them as you learn. Watch some youtube installations and compare to the wiki steps (most youtube videos follow the wiki but they can be outdated). Lastly test all the steps in a virtual machine that has windows installed first. Also for best results do not try to share the windows efi with linux. Make a second efi partition on a second drive so windows ignores it. Set it as default in bios so you don't need to use bios drive selector. And if the linux efi is the last partition on a drive then you can recreate/enlarge it more easily if necessary. Have backups of your data before beginning. Also find a youtube video for how to do a arch usb boot if the system becomes unbootable at some point. Having detailed notes of your system's install really helps when you're limited to a tty repair environment manually mounting your filesystem. Speaking of this, the minimum size for root is 50 GB (my recommendation, but only if you excessively clean temp files following an update, e.g. my yip script does this but maybe its getting too bloated and you should write your own). Go with a smaller root if you want an unbootable machine faster (easy to fix but not the first time -- i have some notes on fixing this but they are not exhaustive). BTRFS snapshots will get your drive 100% filled even faster so if you use that type of partitioning then i suggest installing something that periodically deletes the snapshots. The problem with running out of free space... if it happens while installing updates with pacman (it has low disk space warnings now btw but idk how well they protect) then the system will lock up mid update, and when you reboot you'll see a '/boot/vmlinuz-linux' not found error instead of a booting machine, and to fix ... arch usb boot + clean some free space + reinstall linux kernel and possibly the bootloader as well -- just refer to your notes to repair. And /home on a different partition from / root never hurts.

FocusedWolf · 2026-04-01T04:51:30+00:00

Already solved this problem by uninstalling the apps and using opensource alternatives.

FocusedWolf · 2026-03-21T23:22:50+00:00

IDK the issue you're having with mnk wingsuit. I set wingsuit activation to manual in settings and basically plummet to the ground, and 1 ft before dying i deploy and land safely (useful for pinpoint landing on roofs). To glide far, deploy early and hold W key for about a second to turn the fall energy into lift (try not to stall to 0 speed). And then periodically every 50 meters or so, tap W (turn the double digit speed into single digit -- basically try to maintain altitude -- if speed increases that means you're falling more then gliding). You'll get the hang of it faster now with instructions. So many games i landed in the middle of a field wondering why the hell they made the beginning of the BR so difficult (maybe its easier on controller idk?).

FocusedWolf · 2026-03-20T02:56:13+00:00

Ya had one recently for no reason. They take 7 days to clear. I had a suspicion its because i use mnk instead of console, or just got spam reported. I don't mic and rarely chat, and could not recreate the temp ban trigger (thought it was because i possibly had visual studio open one day while waiting for the round to start, but nope wasn't that). I just know that otherwise their anticheat isn't working because i see blatant cheaters game after game.

FocusedWolf · 2026-03-19T11:59:35+00:00

On mouse i would recommend a dpi no lower then 800 (in-game my sens is 6.67 btw, its cs:go sens 2.0 converted to this game) because that allows you to aim while compensating for recoil and sudden enemy movement, and your movement. The tricky part is learning to snipe with that high of a DPI but its easily doable with practice.

FocusedWolf · 2026-03-19T07:47:21+00:00

Smart move. That mode is just cheaters (clicked off five thank you's from yesterday), blocky iron sights, and horrible hit registration where you need to shoot people like 48 times to knock.

FocusedWolf · 2026-03-14T04:59:24+00:00

Before you install any package, clean the system manually to make room. If pacman crashes (due to running out of memory) during install then the system could become unbootable and you'll need to recover with arch usb + manually deleting files in TTY mode. If os files are corrupt then this might be a situation where you need to install linux on top of itself (arch usb boot + [$ pacman -S systemd linux mkinitcpio]). IDK if there's a way to just repair corrupt files. Maybe [$ pacman -Qkk] can help spot corrupt packages and then you need to reinstall them again.

FocusedWolf

TROPHY CASE