Np. Thanks for the reply! You have so far been the second source of knowledge I have seen on question 2. I'll probably go the multiple amps route though as slowly building an amp farm is more budget friendly atm.

Just because not many people use a package, doesn't mean it is irrelevant. For open source packages (or anything really), as soon as one additional person uses a package, that package becomes relevant. The person/people using it become its advertisers, and when enough people are seen using a product, especially a free one, a larger group will use either that package or something similar to cut their own programming costs.

This is simplified, but the point is that we need to stop this sort of thing at the root (the package itself) before it gets noticed by larger groups and companies who might actually get away with this BS. Always remember, we are tech/privacy nerds. We are the minority, and the average person doesn't care until something hurts them directly.

My point is less that leaving Arch alone breaks things and more that updating after a really long time can break something. It also kinda defeats the point of using a rolling release distro. I can see how you thought i was spreading misinformation though. My bad for poor wording.

It's a desktop PC with mostly unbalanced analogue audio outputs. Eventually I plan to get a dac and run from pc to that to amp(s), but rn I have my priorities set on building my output.

Arch Linux with NVIDIA is definitely not great for newbies, especially for people who can't keep up with the distro. If left unupdated for too long, your system may break. Even if you update every day, you could break something. You just never win with a rolling release distro like this. My only saving grace is that I run with an AMD gpu and so far, that thing has just worked.

My tip for anyone switching to Linux is to switch to AMD. Even if NVIDIA is better overall for performance and features, even if the last time you tried AMD on your windows system it was slow and a bit buggy, on Linux, AMD just works, without extra steps.

I also had that problem, but didn't think much of it since I don't really turn off my VPN often. It only really affected me when either my first issue occurred or ProtonVPN crashed for whatever reason. So far, running ProtonVPN through OpenVPN had solved this issue for me.

This has worked nicely! Thanks

All of my other devices are either Windows or Android for convenience. The VPN works on Windows, but I can't isolate this issue via that route as those devices are old and have their own issues.

I have tried running my system without vpn and this specific issue hasn't appeared from yesterday until now. It is making me feel a little uncomfortable not having it on though.

I'm going to try another suggestion, then I'll come back to this one if it still doesn't work.

Apparently I had uninstalled the kwallet manager. I'll change the password and see if my problem still occurs.

Unfortunately, several other programs use this as a dependency and some of those programs are required by stuff like plasma-meta.

I like Vsauce, but YouTube just never recommends his videos to me. Same with all the others except for Veritasium. I just haven't seen enough of their content and schedule.

Never really watched him much since I was more into minecraft content when I was younger, but I'll take another look at the channel.