Native Arch Linux support for OpenVINO AI Plugins

[blackdiagon]

Hi everyone,
first of all, thank you for this amazing project – the features it brings to Audacity are truly impressive.
I recently switched from Windows to Arch Linux and was hoping to continue using the OpenVINO AI plugins. Unfortunately, I've been unable to find a stable installation path for Arch: The official Linux build instructions are written for Ubuntu 22 and the dependency installation scripts explicitly reject Arch with an "unsupported OS" error.
The available AUR packages (audacity-openvino and audacity-openvino-bin) appear to be broken or unreliable at the moment
Installing via Snap did not work either.
I understand that maintaining packages for multiple distributions takes significant effort, and I really appreciate the work that has already gone into Linux support. That said, Arch Linux has a large and active user base in the audio/music production community, so native support would likely benefit quite a few people.
Would it be feasible to either:

• Provide a distribution-agnostic build path (e.g. via a .tar.gz with bundled dependencies), or
• Add Arch Linux to the list of supported distributions in the build scripts?

I'd be happy to help with testing if that would be useful.
Thanks for considering this!

[RyanMetcalfeInt8]

Hi @blackdiagon!

I've heard Arch Linux support mentioned a few times here, so it indeed may be worth investigating.

And just to point out -- When it comes to Linux, I only help to write / test the various 'build from source' methods (such as the Ubuntu guide that you pointed out). For pre-compiled distributions that you mentioned (AUR packages, snap packages, etc.) -- those are all contributed by members of the community (such as @frenchwr for snap support ).

I think the challenge for Arch Linux is, there aren't any 'pre-compiled' OpenVINO drops for that specific OS -- e.g. https://storage.openvinotoolkit.org/repositories/openvino/packages/nightly/2026.1.0-21310-c694fbc2b6d

It may not be a big deal -- as it might just mean that we'd need to build OpenVINO & OpenVINO GenAI from source -- whereas other distros (like Ubuntu), we can skip that whole step and download the already compiled / ready-to-go packages.

In fact, figuring out / producing an Arch Linux guide is (probably) a fairly trivial task for AI -- would you want to give it a shot? For example, give ChatGPT a link to the current 'next' branch build documentation: https://github.com/intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity/tree/next/doc/build_doc/linux and have it produce something for Arch Linux.

This would be very helpful if you have some time to help look into it!

[blackdiagon]

Hy @RyanMetcalfeInt8 Yes, I'd love to help. I'll try to get it running on Arch Linux and write a documentation on the steps to reproduce.

[RyanMetcalfeInt8]

Awesome, thanks so much @blackdiagon! Let me know if you encounter any snags, and we'll try to help!

[blackdiagon]

@RyanMetcalfeInt8 Thanks. It was a real struggle, but i eventually figured out a way to get it running. I will add my documentation as a pull request.

[sund00bie]

@RyanMetcalfeInt8 Thanks. It was a real struggle, but i eventually figured out a way to get it running. I will add my documentation as a pull request.

Thanks for your effort! I'll follow along at blackdiagon@467017e and give it a go