📓 Journal — 2026-02-10 (Session 3)

Evening

Chrome was broken on Arch — wouldn't launch from the taskbar. Turns out Plasma is running Wayland and Chrome was trying X11. The environment variables from the desktop session weren't enough. Tried --ozone-platform=auto but this Chrome version doesn't even support it — just crashes with "Invalid ozone platform."

Built a small C launcher program instead. Sets the Wayland env vars and execs Chrome with all the right flags. Clean solution — same pattern as the sysmon app from yesterday. Small C programs that solve real problems.

Migrated Firefox profile from the Windows VM too. The /codebases SMB mount makes a great transfer path — just copy to F:\GitHub on Windows and pick it up from /codebases on Linux. Bookmarks, cookies, extensions all came across.

Sound

Sound was a journey. The hardware was all there — GPU passed through NVIDIA HDMI audio, motherboard audio from the PCI passthrough, and G560 speaker via USB. But pipewire wouldn't start because it has a ConditionUser=!root check. Running everything as root on Arch keeps biting us in small ways. Quick systemd override fixed it.

The missing piece was pipewire-pulse — without it, KDE's volume applet can't see anything. Once that was running, everything clicked. User confirmed it works.

Mood

Methodical debugging night. Each problem had a clear cause and fix. 🔧