Manjaro boots only to Terminal

Hello, I’m using Manjaro Gnome. After the last Updates and reboot, I wanted to clean and removed the packets under the orphaned section. Now Manjaro only boots to the Terminal without any GUI. How can I fix this?

Hi @Free-Neon, welcome to the forum.

Looks like you removed a bit too much with your orphan-cleaning, orphan cleaning isn’t reccomended unless you know exeactly what you’re removing (or at least have a timeshift snapshot you can roll back to if something goes wrong :slight_smile:).

Please see the post linked below – it should solve your issue. Basically you need to reinstall gdm which you likely removed as one of the orphans.

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Thanks a lot it worked. But after reinstalling no packets are under the orphaned section. That’s a bit confusing. Do the packets under the orphaned section get automatically cleaned at some point?

Sometimes packages find themselves in the orphaned list when they shouldn’t. The orphaned package listing is notorious for being inaccurate, and no, there is no automatic cleaning of them.

I think the general consensus is to not remove any orphans unless you 100% are sure they’re not needed. Leaving them doesn’t hurt your system (other than taking up a small amount of space, usually), but removing them can break your system.

I believe the majority of people never clean or look at orphaned packages. The only situation that you should really consider cleaning them is if you’re starting to get desperate for storage. That’s when you can start looking at large orphans one by one to verify if they’re really no longer needed by the system or are part of something important, and if they’re not needed removing them.

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When you reinstalled gdm it would be tagged as explicitly installed, i.e. no longer an orphan.

To add an example to @belyash’s nice explanation,

An example in my system, pamac thinks linux61-headers is an orphaned package. It is needed by a DKMS package which compiles a driver for every installed kernel. This dependency can’t be statically listed in package dependencies.

This situation leaves room for improvement in the packaging system, and an easy workaround of manually marking the package explicitly installed.

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