NoMachine (cautionary tale, stopped Wayland and Games from working)

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I installed NoMachine from the AUR. Never got it to work, forgot about it.

Either way, one day my Wayland wouldn’t work, some cogs would spin on my screen and the text Manjaro. 20 secs later, black screen and nothing but a cursor. Couldn’t do anything. Other than switch to TTY. Fired up journalctl -f to see what was going on. Got something about plasma.kcminit.phase1.service and dependency failed. Is it KDE then? I rebooted, logged into X11 instead, worked like usual. But none of my games would start. That’s weird. vulkaninfo --summary just threw errors, like 5-6 lines of them. Something with Mesa?

Turns out it was NoMachine. It seems to not clear out the files it installs and places on the system, when uninstalling it. Creating problems. More info: [SOLVED]KDE under Wayland has issues starting. libEGL and Mesa invo... / Applications & Desktop Environments / Arch Linux Forums
Now, as long as you don’t uninstall NoMachine, you wont have problems but as soon as you do…

As the last post says: “Remove /etc/udev/rules.d/99-virtualgl-dri.rules solve the problem.”

It did solve the problem.
Initially I thought latest update might have caused something. I like to play with my system so clashes and incompatibilities are not rare. Took me 2 weeks trying to find the cause, used a backup clone 2-3 times etc.
Part of journalctl that finally lead me to the answer, especially the last part about Mesa (which I did not see when following journalctl):

xdg-desktop-por[10879]: Failed to create settings proxy: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.kde: Timeout was reached
jun 17 21:46:07 xdg-desktop-por[10879]: Failed to create file chooser proxy: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.kde: Timeout was reached
jun 17 21:46:32 xdg-desktop-por[10879]: Failed to create app chooser proxy: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.kde: Timeout was reached
jun 17 21:46:48 kded6[21283]: MESA: error: ZINK: vkEnumeratePhysicalDevices failed (VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED)

I hope the next person finds the solution faster than I did.

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This serves to highlight that use of the AUR is not officially supported on Manjaro (or Arch, for that matter), and that when one has issues arising from these packages, one is effectively on their own.

However, I’m glad you managed to resolve it.

Cheers.

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Archwiki - Graphical issues (especially with Wayland) after uninstalling NoMachine

See this forum post. NoMachine alters some permissions by means of files in /etc/udev/rules.d and /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d, but these don’t get removed properly after uninstalling NoMachine.
This leads to graphical issues under X, and not booting properly at all under Wayland
(with errors like libEGL warning: failed to open /dev/dri/renderD128: Permission denied).
To solve this, remove the following directories and files:

/etc/opt/VirtualGL
/usr/share/gdm/greeter/autostart/virtualgl.desktop
/etc/modprobe.d/virtualgl.conf 
/etc/udev/rules.d/99-virtualgl-dri.rules
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-virtualgl-dri

Also remove the line regarding nomachine in the file /usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup.

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Even more stuff to clean up?

Thank you