I started my computer after it was completely shut down, and I can log in fine but nothing will launch. I can’t launch konsole, dolphin, firefox, anything at all with the exception of the Add/Remove Software gui. I get no error messages, I click icons and get the spinning circle and then it stops and nothing further happens. At most I can right click my desktop and open desktop settings. I’ve shutdown completely, restarted, put into sleep, hard shut down, and nothing has changed.
I apologize if this isn’t the right place for this and will happily move it if necessary, but I’m at a loss as to what to even try to do, any help at all would be greatly appreciated.
I assume you might still have the USB-Stick or install media you used to install Manjaro. Maybe use that media to boot your system as that set of software should be a known to be working state. You may also share more information about your system and what things you did lately with it.
You may also be able to switch to a virtual console or TTY by hitting
CTRL-ALT-F2
You will be presented with the standard command-line interface. You can log in and check some things. I seem to recall people recently having trouble with a configuration file getting corrupted. Take a look at the size of this file.
ls -l ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc
@Takakage is probably right. I’ve had this same problem twice, and that file was the cause both times. If you rename that file and reboot you should be able to use your computer again.
That was precisely what we were looking for: an abnormally large file size (mine is only about 7 kB). The easiest path is to do as @jcorporon suggested: rename that file and reboot (or maybe just log out and back in).
cd ~/.config
mv plasma-org.kde.desktop.appletsrc plasma-org.kde.desktop.appletsrc.bak
Note that this will remove customizations you may have made to the desktop and panel. If you absolutely need to restore them, you may be able to look at the original version of the file and find the specific line that causes the problem. I have read that the [ScreenMapping] section was getting corrupted.
At the point the desktop settings are going to be reset anyways …
Might as well do all the steps outlined in the archwiki above:
cd ~/.config
for j in plasma*; do mv -- "$j" "${j%}.bak"; done
rm ~/.config/Trolltech.conf
kbuildsycoca5 --noincremental
And maybe the cache too?
rm -rf ~/.cache/*
plasma things in .config will be backed up with .bak appended to the filename.
When you are confident you dont need them anymore you can remove those files as well.