Introduction

This post is about my recent experience with Brave browser on Arch Linux. I was getting logged out which was very annoying. After a series of hits and trials, Brave finally does not log me out. In this post, I’m going to share my journey and the decisions I made to achieve here.

Backstory

For those who don’t know, I recently built a PC for the first time in my life (the first time I was doing every connection) because of my aging laptop.

Fun fact: This is the 4th computer I’m owning, and 3rd PC. My last one was a laptop.

When everything was working properly, I decided to declare this machine as an experiment ground. By that, I meant I’d carry important work-related stuff on my laptop itself.

As it was experimental, I decided to install Arch on it. The reason you ask? Hyprland was gaining a lot of popularity on r/unixporn. Hyprland is a tiling window manager. If this machine was going to be an experiment, why not try new things?

I followed my friend Gabriel Chamon’s crash course about setting up Hyprland and the ecosystem. You can find them at: https://xd1.dev/2024/03/hyprland-crash-course

Issue with Brave and explored options

My setup was fun. I was euphoric. The distro was not giving me any issues regardless of what I had heard of Arch is a rolling release and breaking frequently.

But one day, after the system update, it was not hard to notice that my Brave was not starting which was configured to start at session startup.

I tried launching it from the terminal to diagnose the issue by looking at its log. It seems like Brave requires certain things that were not installed. It caught me by surprise because the dependency should have been installed by the package manager itself.

Installing kwallet

Seems like, by default, Brave requires kwallet to store the credentials of users. These are the credentials used for logging in to different websites.

I installed kwallet. And finally my brave was back to normal. Just an annoyance that whenever I started Brave, I had to unlock the wallet by putting in the password.

Just so that you know, this prompt to enter a password has a timeout. And in a situation where Brave is auto-starting on a session, if you don’t enter the password quickly, you are logged out from Brave on all sites for the login session.

I lived with this annoyance for a couple of weeks. But it was a pain point to survive on Arch. So I started to look at solutions.

Installing kwallet-pam and …

I heard a new concept of PAM. I don’t know too deep about it, but this is something that can be used to unlock the kwallet automatically. This is exactly what I wanted.

As Brave looks for kwallet, Arch has a kwallet-pam package which can work for me. But a twist with using such PAM plugins is that the wallet password and the login password must be the same. But wait, the wallet was already created. How do I change the password now?

Meet kwalletmanager. It’s a UI for the kwallet backend. As the name implies, you can manage every aspect of the wallet, from creating, and deleting, to changing the password.

You’ll find a lot of confusion in configuring kwallet-pam if you are doing it for the first time. In the documentation, they’ve mentioned that keeping the name of the wallet to the default for many applications to work. The default name they mention is kwallet (not to be confused with the package name).

But when you go ahead to create a wallet without specifying the name. It will create a wallet with the name Default keyring. To add more to the confusion, I was convinced that Default keyring is the default name because I was familiar with this name on Ubuntu.

I tried both, but Brave on the other hand was getting logged out on every reboot no matter what.

What finally worked

What I’m going to describe is not the most secure option. And please, if you find a secure setup that is working for you; I’m looking forward to it. Please let me know in the comments.

There is a flag in Brave, which is basically inherited from Chromium. It’s called --password-store. By default, it is kwallet (at least on my Arch install) if you don’t pass it anything. There is an option to change it to basic.

Not sure how to secure my password is, because I never save my password to the browser. I always select the stay signed in option. And whether or not I’m logged in or out of a site should be related to cookies, not a password manager. But still, I find this a gray area.

If you know more about this situation. Or have already passed through this experience, I’d love to hear back from you. Until then, have a good time.