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)

  • daniyeg@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • someonesmall@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      Why would a package called “masterpdfcreator” overwrite the x conf? I don’t think the AUR packages have anything to do with the problem.

      • daniyeg@lemmy.ml
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        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.

  • Luci@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      9 months ago

      Have you even looked at the picture they posted or do you just reply with nonsense by default when you see the word “Manjaro”?

      • Luci@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        Yeah the picture looks exactly like my experiences with Manjaro. Thanks

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • Rustmilian@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            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.

            • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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              9 months ago

              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?

              • Rustmilian@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                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.

                • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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                  9 months ago

                  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.

                • yianiris@kafeneio.social
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                  9 months ago

                  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.

                  @Rustmilian @lemmyvore

          • Luci@lemmy.ca
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            9 months ago

            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.

            • pizzawithdirt@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              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.

            • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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              9 months ago

              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?

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    9 months ago

    One of your steps should be to throw Manjaro in the trash and install EndeavourOS instead.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      9 months ago

      How would their problem be any different on Endeavour? They are circumventing the normal X greeter and starting a custom X session.

      • BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
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        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.

          • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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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.

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        9 months ago

        This issue is more than likely caused by Manjaro itself.

        So yeah, probably would not have experienced this issue on EndeavourOS, that’s right.

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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          9 months ago

          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.

        • deikoepfiges_dreirad@lemmy.zip
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          9 months ago

          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.

            • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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              9 months ago

              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.

              • dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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                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.

                • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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                  9 months ago

                  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.

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            9 months ago

            Of course it’s not, hence why I said “one of your steps”.

            As in, get your data back, and then drop Manjaro.

            • dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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              9 months ago

              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 Arch Manjaro?

              • null@slrpnk.net
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                9 months ago

                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.

                • dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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                  9 months ago

                  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

                • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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                  9 months ago

                  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.

              • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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                9 months ago

                OP’s problem was not caused by an AUR package. They’re leaving out some details about how they ruined their X setup themselves.

                • dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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                  9 months ago

                  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…

  • Rustmilian@lemmy.world
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    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 or archinstall , else this won’t be the last time something like this happens.

    • deikoepfiges_dreirad@lemmy.zip
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      9 months ago

      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

    • Yardy Sardley@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      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.

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      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 startx would 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 -lh does 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

  • BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br
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    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

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      9 months ago

      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?

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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          9 months ago

          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.

    • null@slrpnk.net
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      9 months ago

      However I still recommend you to use AUR as less as possible, cause too many AUR can mess even with Arch

      Based on what?

      • BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • null@slrpnk.net
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br
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            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

            • null@slrpnk.net
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              9 months ago

              Right – so like I said, nothing to do with the AUR and everything to do with being smart about what software you install.

  • Presi300@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

  • someonesmall@lemmy.ml
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    Don’t use startx to start X, use the display manager: systemctl restart lightdm

  • MagneticFusion@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    The problem is that you used Manjaro to begin with. The whole point of being on an arch based distro is to use the AUR. Manjaro tries to make arch more stable by holding back packages, but then because of that, if you install packages from the AUR (which again is the whole point of being on arch), you make Manjaro less stable than Arch itself. So it’s a lose lose situation.

    If you want to stick to Arch based, either go vanilla Arch or EndeavourOS. Or if you don’t care about the AUR but still want updated packages, I can not recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed enough.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      9 months ago

      Please kindly shut up if you’re not even going to attempt to help OP. Their issue had nothing to do with the distro.

      • fl42v@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        Allrighty, let’s try turning it into “helping”. When one finds themselves using manjaro, they should:

        1. Prepare a flash drive with recent arch iso flashed (that shouldn’t be strictly necessary, but just in case);
        2. Go to the pacman’s mirrorlist and replace their repos with the proper ones (i.e. from arch);
        3. Do a -Syyuu base --overwrite=*;
        4. (optional) In case of trouble, boot to the drive flashed at step 0, make necessary mounts, arch-chroot, solve the problems. One can also try pacstrap-ing instead.

        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 :)

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • fl42v@lemmy.ml
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            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

            • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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              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.

              • fl42v@lemmy.ml
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                9 months ago

                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

  • Offbus@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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?