EDIT: I kinda solved it by installing Wayland (on my 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)
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.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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
One of your steps should be to throw Manjaro in the trash and install EndeavourOS instead.
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
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…
Master PDF Editor is on Flathub. If anything can be installed as a flatpak, I would try that first. If a program fits in a sandbox, consuming the files that I give it and drawing in its own little window, Flatpak has that down cold. If a program wants the ability to stick its hands into the guts of other programs and system services and shared libraries - that should happen at the distro level or not at all.
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
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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