Failed to start Light Display Manager - Can't get other forum answers to work

Hello! I’m a fairly new Linux user, so please be patient with me. I’m pretty good at following instructions and figuring things out. I’ve looked up my issue and cannot for the life of me get any of the solutions to work or people close out the forums without presenting the solution, so I’m frustrated. Please help!

I boot my PC and see “Failed to start LIGHT DISPLAY MANAGER”

I cannot log in to copy the prompts I’ve looked at running, from previous forums, it seems to be a fairly common issue others have resolved. Help!

Howdy!

May I ask if this is a fresh installation, please?

Thank you!

I have had Manjaro installed since I want to say March 2020, previously mint, but it was a fresh install when I installed it. I COULD wipe everything again, but I’d rather not because of all the gaming packages I’ve since installed.

I believe this is stemmed from several recent updates, they were all large.

Sweet!

You may then open a TTY (basically a ‘full-screen terminal’) by pressing ctrl+alt+f5
Login byt entering your username (in lowercase), then enter the following:

rm ~/.*
cp -r /etc/skel/.* ~/

This will restore default config file for your directory!

May try to execute startx, to also see the logs, and see if it works!

Looks like a lot of cannot remove, open or access various files or directories, permissions denied.

That is to be expected. Only few of them are of interest!

May I ask if you have a NVIDIA Graphic Card and the output of uname -r , please?

I do have Nvidia, uname -r is: 5.9.8-2-MANJARO

First let’s try to reinstall lightdm.

In the TTY, input sudo pacman -S lightdm lightdm-slick-greeter !

May then try once again to activate the systemd services by entering sudo systemctl enable lightdm .

Hope that helps!

I’ve entered the command and the response is:

Warning: lightdm-1:1.30.0-4 is up to date – reinstalling
Error: target not found: lightdm-slick-greeter!

That is indeed interesting. Are you connected to the internet, may I ask?

Does ping manjaro.org returns anything?

I am not hard lined to the internet, but my internet stick is flashing, so I would assume. It is returning line after line of the same thing with increasing seq and time stamps on each line, below is just one of the lines, it’s still counting.

64 bytes from mail manjaro org (176.9.38.148): icmp_seq=196 TTL=54 time=141 ms

There are periods between mail, Manjaro and org, it stated I couldn’t send back to you with links, so you are aware there are periods in place where there are otherwise spaces.

Okay, so let’s try sudo pacman -Syyuu for now…

Looks like I’m doing a system upgrade to the most recent stable version? Is that correct?

Yes, this may solve some issues by installing missing or broken dependencies, and sort of leveling everything up together!

Oh that’s awesome! Will I need to reinstall arch linux, wine and all of my other applications to make my windows games work? Linux is certainly better than windows in almost every way, but making everything speak the same language is rather taxing! XD

Fortunately not!

This also upgrades all of your applications and some configs!

May just reboot after!

Nooooo!!! It didn’t work!!!

I may need more informations, please! :sweat_smile:

What next?