Asusctl asusd.service not starting after a fresh install

[Mydixadril]

I have two ZenBooks. My Asus ZenBook had a fresh install of Manjaro back in January 2026. My friend’s ZenBook, we did a fresh install last night with the latest image from manjaro.org.

The two systems are nearly identical in every way, but Package asusctl will not function properly, we get an error message that asusd.service won’t start.

Asusctl was installed using Pamac GUI, and relevant dependencies were installed as well:
ACPI_call: fan control
ACPI_call-dkms

Here’s the output from the CLI:

asusd is not running, start it with `systemctl start asusd
[ERROR asusctl] Could not get asusd version: MethodError(OwnedErrorName("org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown"), Some("The name is not activatable"), Msg { type: Error, serial: 4294967295, sender: UniqueName("org.freedesktop.DBus"), reply-serial: 5, body: Str, fds: [] })
    Is asusd.service running? true

$ systemctl start asusd
Job for asusd.service failed because start of the service was attempted too often.
See "systemctl status asusd.service" and "journalctl -xeu asusd.service" for details.
To force a start use "systemctl reset-failed asusd.service"
followed by "systemctl start asusd.service" again.

$ systemctl reset-failed asusd.service

$ systemctl start asusd.service
Job for asusd.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status asusd.service" and "journalctl -xeu asusd.service" for details.

$ systemctl status asusd.service
× asusd.service - ASUS Notebook Control
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/asusd.service; static)
     Active: failed (Result: start-limit-hit) since Tue 2026-05-12 09:22:06 EDT; 4s ago
 Invocation: a01b9eddeb8b40dd970fc75591c5563f
    Process: 2804 ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 1 (code=exited, status=226/NAMESPACE)
   Mem peak: 2.6M
        CPU: 16ms

May 12 09:22:06 ZenBookDJ systemd[1]: asusd.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
May 12 09:22:06 ZenBookDJ systemd[1]: asusd.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
May 12 09:22:06 ZenBookDJ systemd[1]: asusd.service: Failed with result 'start-limit-hit'.
May 12 09:22:06 ZenBookDJ systemd[1]: Failed to start ASUS Notebook Control.

Edit update: I didn’t make it clear at the top, but my Asus laptop ran asusctl just fine for limiting maximum charge limit. Since my laptop was intended as a “distro-hopping, distro experimentation” setup, I decided to try a clean install on my own system. And now I’m having the same problem. Oops.

Mod edit: Removed zsh-generated junk characters & improved formatting for clarity.

[Mirdarthos]

Tip

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Or three (3) tilde signs, like this:

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This will just cause it to be rendered like this:

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Instead of like this:

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Alternatively, paste the text you wish to format as terminal output, select all pasted text, and click the </> button on the taskbar. This will indent the whole pasted section with one TAB, causing it to render the same way as described above.

Thereby increasing legibility thus making it easier for those trying to provide assistance.

For more information, please see:

@Fabby

On this forum here you need to have Trust Level 1 (=TL1) to be able to post screenshots and links in-line.

That’s dumb! Why is that?

Well, that’s because on our old forum we got tons of screenshots of text, links to SPAM, PR0N and other things you don’t want on a forum, so all the new users are prohibited from posting links and pics because of a few bad actors.

As I’m a moderator on the forum, I have taken the liberty of doing this for you, this time.

---

Additionally

If your language isn’t English, please prepend any and all terminal commands with LC_ALL=C. For example:

LC_ALL=C bluetoothctl

This will just cause the terminal output to be in English, making it easier to understand and debug.

Note that the above text is partially pre-prepared as a general introduction for new forum Users. Please take the time to to understand how it is done and encourage quality responses.

[Mydixadril]

Update: I figured it out. The system was crashing out because asusctl was not able to create a directory in /etc/ called “asusd”.

I manually created the folder, and poof, system charge limits are now active!