My network manager fails. I cant open a terminal in the gui. If i go to console 2 i can log in but get error libunistring.so.2: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory. My machine wont run anything from there including pamac.
I created a symbolic link to libunistring.so.5, and all seems well. Is there a better long term fix?
It appears you are in an unsupported partial upgrade state. Remove the symlink you created, update your mirrors and perform a full update.
Thank you for the suggestion, I updated my mirror list as mentioned, reran pacman -Syyu and got “There is nothing to do.”
What network manager are you talking about here?
If it was the regular ones used by the official editions, a lot more people would be complaining about this.
I had a very similar problem.
I do believe it was a partial update sort of thingy.
But, mainly I wanted to say thanks, as the symbolic link between libunistring so.2 and so.5 proved to be a key bit of info that I needed to fix the problem.
Just in case it helps anyone …
I had used the pamac gui to update the system.
It had come back with a notice to reboot the system.
I said no at that time, finished something, then had to get away from the computer so I shut it down.
Came back, rebooted, had a problem very similar to the problem described. Or, more precisely … the xfce interface loaded slowly, network manager was gone, and trying to go to terminal gave a ‘not found’ sort of error.
The answer about a partial update sounded very possible. So …
Today, re-learned about manjaro-chroot and such, got going from a boot stick, and got into my install and tried to update. pacmac responded with a message about how libunistring.so.2 was missing. This is where this post helped me out!!!
The symbolic link trick got me passed that error. I did the pacman-mirrors bit and then an update, which I think said nothing needed. Another bit I found on the internets suggested forcing a reinstall of libunistring. That worked, and everything seems fixed now. Fingers crossed. 
But, yes, I had a very similar problem. And thank you very much to the original poster who gave me a key little hint about how to solve my problem. Thank you!
not sure why libunistring caused the whole thing to break, however, in my case, I renamed /usr/lib/libunistring.so.5 to /usr/lib/libunistring.so.2. Then, restarted the network manager, downgraded from the cache all the newly updated packages, restored the system to where it was.
We sure won’t know with info we are getting so far.
This or symlinking isn’t a solution. It will cause further problems down the road.
Well, you’ll have to update at one point. And the problem will still be there. (unless of course, it was a partial upgrade in the first place)
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My network manager fails. I cant open a terminal in the gui. If i go to console 2 i can log in but get error libunistring.so.2: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory. My machine wont run anything from there including pamac.
I created a symbolic link to libunistring.so.5, and all seems well. Is there a better long term fix?
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TOTAL WASTE
just rename the libunistring.so.5 file with libunistring.so.2, and that’s it you are good to go…
(rename using thunar root or any other roots)
Total waste is your bad advice (which was already mentioned, by the way, and which I addressed in the post just before yours) after topic has been dead for 3 weeks.
Hope you get banned for this, kiddo. Wish you happy renaming of your linux files. And say hi to your mom.