I don’t use arch (shocking I know), so I can’t help you directly, but I will recommend instead that you invest some effort in learning about the Linux networking stack. It’s very powerful and can be very complicated, but usually the only thing you need to do to get it working is something very simple. Basically all distributions use the Linux kernel networking stack under the hood, usually with only a few user-interface sprinkles on top. Sometimes that can get in your way, but usually it doesn’t. All the basic tools you need should be accessible through the terminal.

The most basic things you can check are ip a which should show a bunch of interfaces, the one you’re particularly interested in is obviously the wired interface. This will tell you if it’s considered <UP> and whether it has an “inet” address (among other things). If it doesn’t, you need to get the interface configured and brought up somehow, usually by a DHCP broadcast. Network Manager is usually responsible for this in most distributions. Arch seems to have some information here.

If those things look good, next step is to look at ip r which will tell you the routes available. The most important one is the default route, this will tell your system where to send traffic when it isn’t local, and usually sends traffic to an internet gateway, which should’ve been provided by DHCP and is usually your router, but could also be a firewall, the internet modem itself, or something else. The route will tell it what IP the gateway has, and what interface it can be found on.

Assuming that looks good, see if you can ping the gateway IP. If your packets aren’t getting through (and back) that suggests something is wrong on a lower level, the kernel firewall might be dropping the packets (configuring the kernel firewall is a whole topic in itself) or one of the IPs is not valid and is not registered properly on the network, or the physical (wiring) or the hardware on either end is not functioning or misconfigured.

If you can ping the gateway successfully, the next step is to see if you can ping the internet itself by IP. ping 8.8.8.8 will reach out to one of Google’s DNS servers which is what I usually use as a quick test. If you get no response then it’s either not forwarding your traffic out to the internet, or the internet is not able to get responses back to it, and ultimately back to you. Or Google is down, but that’s not very likely.

If you’ve gotten this far and 8.8.8.8 is responding to you, then congratulations, you HAVE internet access! What you might NOT have is DNS service, which is what translates names into IP addresses. A quick test for DNS is simply to ping google.com and like before, if that fails either your DNS is broken or Google is down, which is still not very likely.

Hopefully this will help you at least start to find out where things are going wrong. From there, hopefully you can at least steer your investigation in the right direction. Good luck!

It might actually be. Linux gaming has come an awful long way thanks to Wine, Steam, Proton, Wayland, etc. Driver support is improving with or without the manufacturer’s help. OpenGL’s constant playing catch-up with DirectX has given way to the limitless potential of Vulkan. The web has moved almost entirely to properly open standards like WebExtensions and Canvas, and has become powerful enough that many well-known apps are literally just Electron wrappers around a HTML/Javascript core that can run on any plaform. Likewise Mono has implemented almost all of .NET and even Microsoft’s own “.NET core” cross-platform (mostly so it can run on containers and cloud more effectively, not to help Linux specifically, but we’ll take it) All these buzzword technologies add up to a seriously strong open source gaming ecosystem, and distros like SteamOS, Bazzite, and others are finally starting to put all these pieces together and polish them into something seriously usable as a daily driver and for gaming.

And once you’ve got the gamers and enthusiasts, you’re on the cutting edge, you’ve got the tip of the spear, and the rest of the spear tends to follow where they lead. Is it happening? Too early to tell, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility. The “Year of the Linux desktop” has always been a joke, but some people weren’t joking and have been seriously working on it. That work appears to be starting to really pay off. Combined with Microsoft’s various Windows 11 missteps continuing to fuel the fire, a lot of people are increasingly receptive to alternatives.

It’s not that weird. What they’re aiming to avoid is the situation where a developer does a bait-and-switch replacement of the original, advertised game concept to chase a new demographic with new money. If you have never experienced this, count yourself lucky. A shady developer can advertise/sell a great concept in some niche like a compelling roguelike, survival crafting game or even a cozy and artistic decorating game, and actually create a decent game with lots of potential… at first. And then when it’s collected a bunch of genuine good reviews and they realize either it’s harder than they thought to make, or it’s not making the cash flow they expected and not likely to, literally just replace the whole product, product page, everything with some generic shoot-em-up battle royale asset flip as an “upgrade” and alienate the early buyers to get a whole new audience to throw money at them until they realize the reviews are for what’s essentially a totally different game before it crashes into mostly-negative territory. You might not think something this egregious ever really happens, but it does, especially in the horrible land of Crowdfunding/Early Access.

The first example I can remember that happened to me personally was called “Star Forge” not to be confused with the more recent board game adaption of the same name. The linked post is about the internal development drama behind the scenes, but the bait-and-switch bullshit happened years ago and it went sideways very quickly and was eventually pulled from the store never to be seen again.