system:
Host: headaches Kernel: 5.8.11-1-MANJARO x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: N/A
Distro: Manjaro Linux
basically i think this has happened to me before and i cant find the thread that helped me fix it. I uninstalled thunar and rebooted and now i have no Desktop or right click menu
how does one go about fixing this?
with what command exactly? Let me guess, you used pamac?
by the tone of your reply, im not supposed to uninstall it this way am i 
yes i used pamac
Thunar is a dependency of xfdesktop, which handles desktop background and right-click menu. Since you uninstalled the former, you also uninstalled the latter.
This won’t has happened if tried to uninstall using
sudo pacman -Rs thunar
One of the reasons I prefer pacman. This syntax would mean that it tries to remove dependent packages but not packages that depend on thunar. Nevertheless, it would have given you an error message, it can’t be removed as required for xfdesktop. This would have be a warning to stop it.
pamac does not have this option AFAIK only to remove dependent packages or at least you need extra options to achieve this (less dangerous) behavior.
Hi, simply in xfce you cannot uninstall thunar, if you want to use another file manager like nemo for example, in default applications select it and that’s it
it would appear that reinstalling xfdesktop helped aswell
cheers and thanks
lesson learned