EDIT: I kinda solved it by installing Wayland (with Nvidia card, Ouch!) to replace Xorg. Not sure if this is gonna last though. Perhaps Manjaro is the one I’m gonna throw out FIRST if anything happens from now on.
What should be the first line of defense? Timeshift?
This happened after I installed AUR package masterpdfeditor and 2 applications from github (some hashing algorithm programs, I think they were “Dilithium” and “Latice-based-cryptography-main”, one of them was provided by NIST.)
If using GUI: I login, black screen for few seconds, then back at login screen.
If going to ctrl+alt+f2, login successful, then startx, see picture provided (higher quality).
I tried adding a new user, but result is the same.
I have a live usb to do the Timeshift. (I can also chroot if necessary… But I’m not extremely professional)
ah classic mistake of installing AUR packages on manjaro. been there done that. check your logs and search for errors, it probably overwrote/deleted some xorg config that you must either manually add back or regenerate. sorry i can’t help further im a linux noobie but that was my issue when this happened to me.
Why would a package called “masterpdfcreator” overwrite the x conf? I don’t think the AUR packages have anything to do with the problem.
ah sorry it’s more accurate to say it can “break” your xorg config cause that was my case. looking at this package it has libgl as one of its dependencies. as i have said i’m not familiar with how exactly it works but it can probably mess with your graphics drivers.
Most stable Manjaro experience
Start by not using Manjaro. Seriously this won’t be the first time this happens to you. It’s not a great distro. Consider EndevourOS if you want Arch without the command line install.
Have you even looked at the picture they posted or do you just reply with nonsense by default when you see the word “Manjaro”?
Yeah the picture looks exactly like my experiences with Manjaro. Thanks
I’ve always suspected that Manjaro detractors might be mostly Linux beginners who do stupid stuff then give up at the first sign of trouble.
You’re not exactly doing your best to change my mind.
The AUR is intended to be used with the official Arch repos; Manjaro repos are often weeks or sometimes even up to a month behind. Even the Manjaro devs put a warning for this reason.
So what if they’re behind. AUR packages have dependency requirements too. They won’t install if dependencies are not met. Unless you force it — but that wouldn’t be their fault.
So how can an AUR package break something if it’s not installed?
It’s called a -bin AUR package being complied against the latest dependencies, but when run it finds an old version that makes the program in question have undefined behavior.
Not even single AUR package has=requirements defined properly in the PKGBUILD, it’s just the nature of the AUR.
There’s all kinds of bugs that can & do occur when a package expects one thing, but finds another. It’s really just that simple.
Not only that, the Manjaro base packages often aren’t even built with the same flags as the Arch base packages; which is probably what happened here.
I’ve even had to create special patching mechanisms myself do to flag incompatibilities in base packages.If an installed AUR package breaks due to distro binary package shift, you rebuild it and that’s it.
If it’s an AUR package that downloads a binary, those binaries are typically made to work on a wide variety of environments.
Not even single AUR package has >= requirements defined properly in the PKGBUILD, it’s just the nature of the AUR.
“What if the package has incorrect dependencies” — seriously, that’s your argument?
Well it would have been a crappy package anyway, no? It will break sooner or later, on Arch or Manjaro or any distro. You rebuild it and move on.
First of all generalizing about this is totally wrong, depending on what software/libraries a program depends on for build makes a huge difference. If it is good old C that is backwards compatible (hence the size of glibc) it will work all the time. Show me one debian or arch official package that is written in C and says for glibc >=2.35
On other software proposing a library to be >=ver-xxx means the packager speculates that future editions will NOT break the build.
Not the original commentor, but I wanted to share my experience.
I’ve been daily driving Linux for over a decade now, about 6 months of that was with Manjaro. I have never had a worse experience with a distro than I did with Manjaro, period. I tried it off a recommendation, and figured my initial issues were just flukes, but I couldn’t keep coming back to a broken system, so I switched distros. I’ve used Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Void Linux, Gentoo, Kali Linux, EndeavorOS, base Arch, Alpine, and my current favorite is Fedora Workstation (though I’ll switch to Kinoite/Fedora Atomic KDE when Fedora 40 releases). I have never had a distro break itself like I experienced with Manjaro, and it was consistently breaking. My experience is not unique; many users have the same issues, and that is constantly echoed in this community. I had 8 years of Linux experience under my belt entering Manjaro, so experience has nothing to do with it. Plus, the issues I experienced were never the result of my actions; Manjaro broke itself. Configs I have never touched in my life were broken.
My suggestion to anyone who wants a better user experience with Arch and doesn’t want to set it up themselves is EndeavorOS. That’s a distro that’s capable of keeping its shit together. If you want to stick your head in the sand and deny the problems everyone else has with Manjaro, I can’t change your mind, and it isn’t worth my time to try. Just wanted to come in and clarify that it has nothing to do with experience. That’s just Manjaro, and it isn’t just an Arch thing, either. I spent about 2 years with Arch-based distros and never had the issues I did with Manjaro. It’s been 3 or 4 years since I last tried it, but everything I’ve heard has indicated that no improvement has been made in the entire system being broken occasionally department.
How is it “sticking my head in the sand” if I’m daily driving Manjaro and I’m seeing none of the problems you claim to exist?
In fact I am hard pressed to understand how you could break it. The claim it “breaks itself” is nonsense. I have completely non-tech savvy users using Manjaro without any issues.
How did yours break?
If it’s a legit, common issue that can hit unsuspecting users I will STFU. But so far whenever I ask this I just get vague hand-waving. I think you understand why I’m having a hard time accepting urban myths versus my own concrete experience.
How did yours break?
I’m going to clarify that I never used AUR while on Manjaro, as that’s an important distinction that is often a cause for issues. The most notable issues I remember having were that my grub config changed after an update, and my boot entries were removed. I had to boot manually through the grub command line, then manually fix the grub config. The second was a combination of issues that likely stemmed from a single cause, but I didn’t care enough to fix it because it was just the last straw. My system went from working perfectly fine one day, to being a laggy disaster the next. Programs took excessively long to open, battery drain rapidly increased, and performance was horrible. Seemed like a really bad memory leak, and rebooting didn’t fix it, so I just installed base Arch which I had already prepared a flash drive for anyway. The timing couldn’t have been better honestly, it was like a going away present. Other than that, I remember having driver issues multiple times, occasional crashes that (usually) went away after a reboot or update, but not much specific past that. It’s been a few years, so I only remember a handful of experiences. I’ve never had a distro crash more often than Manjaro.
But so far whenever I ask this I just get vague hand-waving.
There are probably going to be bandwagoners who join in to hate on Manjaro, and most of them definitely won’t have anything constructive to say, but that happens with everything. Then you have people like me who used it years ago and can only remember a handful of experiences, and some who can’t remember anything useful at all, just remembering being frustrated.
Edit: not worth my time. Blocked them.
Ohoh! Let me try!!
I’ve always suspected that Manjaro users might be mostly Linux beginners who installed the distro because a YouTube influencer said to do so because they wanted to play Steam.
Seriously, I used Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Arch, CrunchBang, and Manjaro as daily runners (just to name a few.) Manjaro was a headache that broke so often, the devs had threads about breakage on the official forums for stable fucking upgrades. If you want to talk about Linux beginners, start by talking about their dev team. Fedora Core 2 was a more stable experience.
Do I have it out for Manjaro? You bet my ass I do. It’s a horrible distro that takes a great distro and adds shit you don’t need. It freezes Arch updates that you need and should use. Its GPU driver utility is a garbage collection of scripts that don’t work half the time.
I got sick of having to troubleshoot breakage and complete fresh installs every time the devs screwed up. It’s not stable nor is it bleeding edge.
Want bleeding edge? Use Arch. Manjaro is too many steps behind. Want stability? Use Ubuntu or Fedora. Rock solid experience even if you want to change DEs or DMs. Want to take a gamble on every update? Manjaro and Mint are ready to ruin your day! At least the Mint devs know they are just Ubuntu with codecs and a shitty DE.
Manjaro, I get it. But Mint is excellent if you want a stable Ubuntu experience without Ubuntu Pro ads in the fucking terminal and a slow as shit proprietary package manager, integrated right into your system package manager.
Oh I see, Mint was out to get you too.
Just spitballing here but what if you’re incompatible with distros that start with an M?
One of your steps should be to throw Manjaro in the trash and install EndeavourOS instead.
How would their problem be any different on Endeavour? They are circumventing the normal X greeter and starting a custom X session.
Classic, never fix anything, just change to <my preferred distro>, you wouldnt have experienced any problems, ever
I would usually agree but Manjaro is a broken piece of garbage. Use Arch or Endeavour if you want to gain experience on an arch based distro.
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If that’s what you think then you don’t understand why people complain about manjaro. It’s the 1 week package delay to “ensure testing”. There have been bugs that were released in arch and a week later in manjaro, no fix nothing. Also, if you use manjaro and the AUR, which they promote as a possibility, you might have a versioning issue where the AUR package expects packages a week faster than manjaro gets them, and that can actually, very easily, break your system.
Endeavour IS arch but not arch with a shiny wrapper and a shiny forum, that’s good, Manjaro is NOT that.
EOS is basically arch but has some packages of theirs that are pulled from their repos, but every other package comes directly from arch, any update comes from arch and so on. They basically reinstall some utility programs and leave you to your devices, no bullshit.
If you want to compare Eos to anything, try garuda, those two are very similar to my understanding.
This issue is more than likely caused by Manjaro itself.
So yeah, probably would not have experienced this issue on EndeavourOS, that’s right.
This issue is more than likely caused by Manjaro itself.
The issue is caused by OP disabling lightdm and using a custom X session. It would’ve backfired on any distro on the planet, because they messed up something in that session.
I agree that manjaro is shit, but “your distro is shit” is not helpful advice for someone who wants to get their graphical session back.
I hate to admit it but perhaps it is not such a bad advice…
For my personal curiosity, how on Earth did you end up uninstalling lightdm and using startx? Did you follow a tutorial? Where do you even get this kind of advice?
For future reference what you did is not for beginners and it would have messed up any distro. It has nothing to do with Manjaro.
Try an immutable distro, maybe that will stand up better to this kind of thing.
I didn’t uninstall lightdm. I was under the impression that startx would just start the GUI, regardless of what “engine” it’s running on.
startx makes a new X server, which uses the programs you put in ~/.xinitrc and the X server depends on the first program in there that runs in the foreground. If that program dies it doesn’t start, the X server doesn’t either.
Of course it’s not, hence why I said “one of your steps”.
As in, get your data back, and then drop Manjaro.
so why would Envdeavor not experience this issue? Does it simply not have the AUR? That’s very unfortunate. Or are they simply not holding back like in
ArchManjaro?Or are they simply not holding back like in Arch?
I’ll assume you mean Manjaro here – Arch doesn’t hold back packages.
And yes, Manjaro holds back packages from the main Arch repos which can break compatibility with the AUR.
EndeavourOS is pretty much literally a GUI installer for Arch.
I’ll assume you mean Manjaro here – Arch doesn’t hold back packages.
ouch, yes, my bad
I think I kinda solved it by installing Wayland. It seems to work, even on my proprietary nvidia drivers
Manjaro holds back packages from the main Arch repos which can break compatibility with the AUR.
Except (1) that’s not a thing that really happens and (2) what happened to OP was done by themselves not by an AUR package.
It is a unmodified Arch install that has a prepackaged setup, so you get a running desktop very easily and get the full.power and configurability of Arch
therr is nothing wring with AUR the problem is manjaro holding off arch packages causes massive dependency problems
OP’s problem was not caused by an AUR package. They’re leaving out some details about how they ruined their X setup themselves.
no idea what caused it. The other 2 apps I installed were (if I remember correctly) "Dilithium” and “Latice-based-cryptography-main”. But since I installed Wayland (instead of using Xorg), everything seems to work now…
If you have it setup timeshift should work…
But please know that the AUR + Manjaro is not a supported or recommend combination. The AUR is intended to be used with the official Arch repos; Manjaro repos are often weeks or sometimes even up to a month behind. Even the Manjaro devs put a warning for this reason.
Not only that, the Manjaro base packages often aren’t even built with the same flags as Arch base packages; which is probably what happened here.
Consider using EndeavorOS orarchinstall, else this won’t be the last time something like this happens.I’m not usually one to blame the distro but… as another comment here has stated, “Most stable manjaro experience”. Try EndeavorOS, it’s manjaro but not bad.
Have you checked the log files under /var/log/xorg.0…log?
Also see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg#Troubleshooting
If you want to get your graphical session back quickly, maybe try setting up GNOME with wayland (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME#Wayland_sessions)
I second the wayland option. Then you at least have a working gui with all your settings and recent work intact while you try to find the glitch in your Xorg install.
You can also check /var/log/pacman.log for the packages you installed, then pacman -Ql the packages to list what files they might have changed
Ok so clearly none of the people commenting here have even bothered to look at your picture or have no idea what you are doing so feel free to ignore them.
Question 1: what’s in your .xinitrc?
Question 2: why are you starting X this way? It’s not for beginners, and from your question it doesn’t sound like you’re an advanced user.
so I kinda solved it by switching to Wayland. Not sure it lasts since im on proprietary nvidia drivers
Question 1: what’s in your .xinitrc?
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/ei9hajgzugfs4qnmg9r1f/h?rlkey=bnedoohvpuilvuzqvgmhi7pda&e=2&dl=0
It also contains the logs people mentioned I should check. The
Xorg.0*files are from the day of the crash, and 2 days later, when I booted again, the other files were created:Xorg.1*Question 2: why are you starting X this way?
I was under the impression that
startxwould just start the GUI regardless what display manager I use (lightdm? not sure), or display server (xorg, x11 in my case) I have installed.EDIT: it took me wayyy too long to copy these files. Apparently
ls -lhdoes not show hidden files … I thought my whole laptop went nuts.it doesn’t sound like you’re an advanced user.
You’re god damn right
Don’t use startx to start X, use the display manager: systemctl restart lightdm
It said I not found or something. I’ll try again tomorrow for full error message
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Why?
Manjaro is not up-to-date with Arch repos. Using AUR in Manjaro is a huge mistake.
If you wanna use AUR, I suggest you to go all in with Arch itself
However I still recommend you to use AUR as less as possible, cause too many AUR can mess even with Arch
I’m using 75 AUR packages without any issues and I’ve been using Manjaro for 4 years. But I’m really worried now that you’ve said that. 😬 When should I begin to expect AUR trouble? Does it happen on the 5th year? What if I reinstall, do I get another 4 years?
Good for you. Have you heard about anecdotal evidence already?
I’m hearing anecdotal evidence all the time, from people who avoid using AUR packages. I’m a person who uses them, and uses a lot of them, and has been doing it for extended periods of time. That’s not anecdotal, it’s concrete proof.
However I still recommend you to use AUR as less as possible, cause too many AUR can mess even with Arch
Based on what?
Based on Arch USER Repository.
AUR packages are maintained by users and can install and overwrite packages in your system and if you install AUR enough, you’ll certainly install a package that corrupts your system.
That’s ridiculous. You can blindly install crap that breaks your system on any distro. Just don’t blindly install things from the AUR and you’ll be fine.
Definitely can. But AUR make it easier, once it’s not officially supported and has permission to install things on your base system with root access.
It’s kinda the same as you download a deb file and install it or use ppa on debian-based distro. All of that can make your system breaks, but in other distros the general recommendation is to use official repos always when the app is available on repos
Right – so like I said, nothing to do with the AUR and everything to do with being smart about what software you install.
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Please kindly shut up if you’re not even going to attempt to help OP. Their issue had nothing to do with the distro.
Allrighty, let’s try turning it into “helping”. When one finds themselves using manjaro, they should:
- Prepare a flash drive with recent arch iso flashed (that shouldn’t be strictly necessary, but just in case);
- Go to the pacman’s mirrorlist and replace their repos with the proper ones (i.e. from arch);
- Do a
-Syyuu base --overwrite=*; - (optional) In case of trouble, boot to the drive flashed at step 0, make necessary mounts,
arch-chroot, solve the problems. One can also trypacstrap-inginstead.
This is a rather high-level overview off the top of my head, and one would likely have to make a few tweaks here and there. Still, I hope it helps :)
What you described would ruin a perfectly good install. It’s like installing Ubuntu then switching the repos to Debian and force overwriting installed files. Why not just install Debian (or Arch, in this case)?
I wonder how many people follow “well meaning” advice like this then blame Manjaro.
Well, that’s kinda how I once converted my artix to arch (skipping a few f-ups on my part and the caveats of switching init), so I’m pretty sure it can work… Although I can try this in a VM if I have some spare time
It may work but there’s no point in doing it. You get something that’s neither proper Arch nor Manjaro.
Manjaro is built around a branch which doesn’t exist in Arch, unlike other Arch derivates, and mixing the installed Manjaro packages with Arch packages can lead to unpredictable results.
That’s why you change the repos, tho, instead of mixing those from arch and manjaro, and do overwrites to avoid trouble with their configs. Also, I have a feeling pacman tells you when a package managed by it is no longer in the repos, so you just remove it to not accidentally take part in another round of ddos-ing aur or whatever manjaro’s packages currently do for fun.
As for why, that’s just to avoid setting up everything from scratch
How did you go about installing the other two packages from git? Do you know what directory they were first cloned to? Did you build from source or run an executable like an appimage? Did any of these actions occur prior to the install of masterpdfeditor?
If nothing else, run weston. It’s not an amazing wayland server, but it’s something.
Check your RAM for errors.
Run this before startx maybe:
xhost +local:
