Chrome's "plaintext fallback" isn't a distro bug. It's a session‑initialization failure. And Arch is the distro most likely to ship a session that's missing the parts Chrome needs.
Chrome/Chromium on Linux never stores passwords in plaintext by design. It stores them in GNOME Keyring (GNOME, XFCE, MATE), or KWallet (Plasma). Those keyrings only work if PAM unlocks them at login, the display manager initializes the session correctly, DBus is running, the keyring has a password, auto‑login isn't bypassing the unlock step, and the WM/DE actually starts the keyring daemon.
If any of those fail, Chrome logs: "Falling back to bsic text encryption". -This fallback uses a hardcoded key ("peanuts"). It's not literal plaintext, but it's effectively plaintext.
Arch's philosophy of giving you the pieces to assemble your own system makes this failure more likely. Arch users frequently end up with greetd instead of GDM/SDDM**, Hyprland/i3/bspwm** sessions without keyring integration**, No keyring package installed at all, PAM configs copied from wikis, Auto‑login bypassing keyring unlock, Custom session scripts that forget to start gnome-keyring-daemon, and Wayland sessions missing environment variables Chrome expects.**
Arch doesn't fix any of this for you. Arch doesn't warn you. Arch doesn't ship sane defaults.
Arch's rolling model increases breakage frequency. Even if you do configure everything correctly: PAM changes, keyring updates, display manager updates, session scripts, Wayland protocol changes, Chrome/Chromium updates, and systemd changes can break the chain at any time.
Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop, etc. ship stable PAM stacks, keyring integration, display manager configs, stable session scripts, stable environment variable setups. -Arch ships whatever upstream pushed yesterday.
Arch users disproportionately run DE-less setups. Chrome expects a real desktop environment. These window managers don't start the keyring daemon, unlock the keyring, export the right environment variables, integrate PAM correctly or initialize DBus properly. (Komorebi on Windows and Mac isn't just better than their TWM's, its' safer!
Arch's documentation encourages minimalism that breaks security. Arch Wiki pages often say things like: "You can disable gnome-keyring if you don't need it.", "You can remove PAM modules you don't use.", "You can use greetd for a minimal login experience.", and "You can start your session manually from .xinitrc."
-All true. All dangerous! Chrome depends on the “bloat” you removed.
Lookout for all DIY distros like Gentoo, Void/Artix, NixOS, Slackware, and Arch derived distros or anything with greetd. -I wouldn't even touch Linux at all knowing about their other desktop security issues though.
