Broken desktop after update(?)

Hi guys!

A bit stressed here and out of power so I haven’t checked the whole internet for solutions. They cut our power today and I was going to bring my working laptop to a hotel to get some work done. But it doesn’t work after reboot.

It boots directly into a useless gray desktop, the top bar is there with rhe time and notifications and I can open the top right menu with wifi, power options etc. Nothing else, can’t show the app launcher, cant switch to a TTY. Can only ssh to it, but not right now without power for my desktop. I have tried updating everything and re-installed gnome etc, no change. Not sure what else to try and dont understand why I cant open a terminal. It does switch screen, but no prompt just writing on a dead terminal.

Losing my whole working day and getting ready to re-install soon

Welcome to the forum! :vulcan_salute:

It appears to be related to nordvpn. The zsh configuration of — I believe — zsh-theme-powerlevel10k has some scripting for that, and this is broken right now.

The three possible solutions are…

  1. Modifying the powerlevel10k configuration and commenting out the line(s) pertaining to nordvpn;

  2. Uninstalling nordvpn; or

  3. Switching to bash as your shell for the time being.

A potentially less desirable solution, depending on how confident you feel about Manjaro, is to switch to the Unstable branch, where the problem has allegedly already been remedied.

According to the people using it, Manjaro Unstable isn’t actually unstable. It’s on par with Arch Stable, and is therefore more prone to frequent package updates. One can always switch branches again later, so switching to Unstable is not a one-way street.

In order to switch, log out of GNOME — you have to be looking at the login screen — and switch to a tty with CtrlAltF3. Log in there with your normal credentials, and then issue the following commands… :point_down:

sudo -i
pacman-mirrors --api --set-branch unstable && pacman-mirrors -f && pacman -Fy && pacman -Syyu

Note: If you cannot do this from the running system — I don’t know how the default shell is set in the GNOME edition, because I use Plasma, and there the default shell for terminal windows is defined via the terminal profiles only, while outside of the GUI, you still get bash — then you will have to run the operation in a chroot environment while booted up from the live USB. This should use bash by default.

After switching branches and updating, be sure to let the whole process finish, and then cleanly reboot the system. :point_down:

systemctl reboot

Hope this helps! :wink:

Thanks for your reply. Im not using nordvpn, but I should have added, Im using a bit unconventional setup. I have the laptop next to my desktop and remote work on it using vnc (vncserver). Now the power is back and vnc works fine. But even if I disable vncserver, which is usually what I do when I need to bring the laptop, the desktop is useless.

Well, actually vnc died after 5 min too. “something went wrong” popup with logout :confused: Not sure whata going on

On another note, I dont have the pacman-mirrors command and can’t install it. Thought it was part of Manjaro?

Yes, it should be. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Which ISO did you install from? :thinking:

It might be a broken — read: no longer supported — GNOME extension. :thinking:

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