After updating last night (update completed just fine) and after rebooting this morning I find my Desktop Environment (xfce) not working properly (first reboot had my desktop backgrounds displaying properly on both monitors, as well as desktop icons on both monitors and panels for one monitor, but no working close/minimise widgets on programs that opened on startup, second reboot had no desktop backgrounds and the same issues) I also discovered my keyboard was not working either and no inputs were being registered.
I tried to open terminal aswell as Garuda Assistant to see if I could fix anything (as I have seen a variation of this problem posted on the forum before) but programs don’t seem to be opening.
Tried booting into a snapshot only to find the snapshot had the exact same issues, and still couldn’t open a terminal or Garuda Assistant.
The only potential problem I noticed before shutting down last night after updating was a check and merge warning, but the only .pac file listed was the mirrorlist, which I refreshed using Garuda Assistant as I have done with no problems in the past.
Very early on using Garuda I had this problem with the desktop environment specifically (keyboard worked that time iirc) and since no answers to this specific problem were available I ended up reflashing my OS, which wasn’t that big of a deal since I hadn’t been using it all that long. However, I now have a pretty well tailored and customised setup going that I put a lot of time into and has worked flawlessly for about a month now so I would like to keep it without having to reflash.
If there is a way to generate garuda-inxi readout or other vital information from somewhere other than an active terminal session while booted please let me know as I cannot open any programs as mentioned above.
Very sorry if any vocabulary is unclear or if I have missed something big and simple as I am still pretty new to Linux but I looked everywhere and could not find a solution to this.
Hi! So I used live ISO to try update from chroot and it seems not to have worked, the desktop environment is still non-functional. I tried to use CTRL + ALT + F2 to try and open a terminal while logged in on the broken OS just to see what would happen and it caused both my screens to go black and lose signal.
What kind of data can I realistically bring over if I have to reflash my OS? Is there any way to copy over the panel preferences and layout for my desktop environment? Would there be a way to transfer over pacman packages I had installed so they can be redownloaded quickly if I need to reflash?
I also wanted to ask if it would be possible to use chroot on live ISO to manually delete and reinstall any broken xfce packages that might be causing this issue? I really don’t wanna have to reflash my OS unless I absolutely have to
Edit: Just to quickly add onto this, I know there’s a way to manually replace xfce for similar issues, but most of what I’ve seen is for Arch specifically and I know garuda-update and other assistance commands/tools help smooth out a lot of the bumps and headaches associated with Arch. Just wanted to clarify that I’m mainly asking incase garuda-update would have fixed this if it was fixable.
You can copy your dot files over to a external drive like .config .local .(w/e browser) an .local *Note if you have steam games they will be there so if you don’t want them best to make the folder manually, .local/share/ an copy everything but steam.
As for pakman pkgs follow these steps here to get the list and install from it pacman/Tips and tricks - ArchWiki
You will want to save 1 with no AUR pkgs and one thats just your AUR pkgs then follow the steps to install after you reinstall.
I managed to get my panels working again by reinstalling xfce from scratch through chroot using pacman -Rdd [xfce and dependencies] followed by pacman -S [xfce and dependencies]
This may have been a bit silly to do without any sort of backup or testing (I was basically doomed anyway) but I now have a better understanding of some of the problems, as I also have the ability to type on my keyboard for a limited time now.
The window UI and my desktop background are still not working, and any attempt to launch programs using UI cannot be done as the launchers are now greyed out when I right click them and cannot be clicked on at all just realized what I was looking at here, silly me, please disregard. Clicking on the icon itself still elicits no response. CTRL, ALTF2 returns the same black screen, which seems like a driver issue from what I can see. I did not see these details before as not even my panels were working before.
I also checked Xorg to see that it had trouble loading my graphics drivers (was using nvidia proprietary, am thinking of switching to video-nouveau once I figure out how to stop conflicts between drivers).
With this new information in mind, especially the problems with programs being unable to launch from right-click panel UI by being greyed out, does this give any insight onto what the problem could actually be and if it is fixable without reflashing my OS and transferring data?
