Manjaro has a weird password-quality setup. The password-quality functionality is provided by the libpwquality package, which provides a PAM plugin named pwquality.so and configuration at /etc/security/pwquality.conf . However, once installed it seems to still not be referenced by the PAM configuration and will not be applied to password changes.

Before making changes, open a root prompt. You will make your changes here and have a place to restore your configuration from if you break anything. Make a backup of /etc/pam.d/system-auth .

Make sure you have the libpwquality package installed.

Open /etc/pam.d/system-auth . There are PAM configurations that deal with authenticating the user and PAM configurations that deal with updating passwords. Look for the password-setting configuration block; those lines will have “password” as the module-type (first column):

-password  [success=1 default=ignore]  pam_systemd_home.so
password   required                    pam_unix.so          try_first_pass nullok shadow
password   optional                    pam_permit.so

Insert the line for pam_pwquality.so above (always above) pam_unix.so, and update the configuration for pam_unix.so to:

password requisite pam_pwquality.so retry=3
password required pam_unix.so try_first_pass nullok shadow use_authtok

The change will apply immediately, though you probably will not see a difference with the default password-quality configuration settings.

Make your desired changes to /etc/security/pwquality.conf . We recommend the following settings:

minlen = 10
dcredit = -1
ucredit = -1
lcredit = -1
ocredit = -1

Open the shell for a nonprivileged account that you would like to use to test password changes and proceed to test the password-quality options that you enabled in order to ensure they work as expected. If you made a mistake, fix them in the root console that you should still have open.

Important note: Unless you have enabled “enforce_for_root” in the password-quality or PAM configuration, you will only see advisory warnings for nonconformant passwords when running as root. You will still be able to set any password you’d like.