Fresh install today of xfce-20.1 on fresh install of vbox (on Win10). Any attempt to install anything, or to change preferences, pauses for 30sec or so and throws up the error box Authentication failed. There is no prompt for password.
I can run it successfully as sudo. (Well, not entirely so: cannot build anything from AUR as root, so although I can fetch packages as root, I can’t build them …)
pacman works (except of course not for AUR).
But I have a fresh install of pamac right out of the box, why doesn’t pamac just work?
That helps a lot, indirectly. I had in fact already checked for upgrades on opening Pamac it proudly announced 100% up to date (being from the latest ISO, one would hope for that). But I had not considered running pamac commands from the terminal.
This narrows down the problem to the GUI. The problem being that the opportunity to authenticate never happens, the authentication menu never appears (as far as I can tell, not even for a brief instant, and given things are running very slowly on a HDD through VBox, it probably would be visible if it ever happened).
But at least I have a workaround, eg $pamac build XXX will successfully call for authentication, accept the right password, and proceed to install XXX. (After I have previously run pamac as root to switch AUR on.)
I’m calling this a workaround rather than a solution, I can’t really say running a major system GUI application by using only the command line version is a solution per se.
I’ve been using Manjaro on my dedicated home desktop for a year or two now, I’m prepared to spend time looking for a solution and comfortable with the command line. But it worries me that a brand new user checking out Manjaro for the very first time, spends an hour installing the system and then apparently cannot install any application at all, with an error message that offers no clue of what is wrong, is not going to be impressed.
I am almost that user you were talking about. I have just distro hopped through about 20ish different distro, Gnome, KDE, and XFCE combinations trying to find the best one. I had settled on Fedora Gnome, but Google Chrome was painfully slow. After some research I saw a ton of other people saying the same thing and it was related to Wayland. That was like the 3rd or 4th problem I had ran into with Wayland so I decided to switch to KDE.
A few spots on the web said Manjaro was the best for KDE, so I installed it. My experience with that was epic. I installed Chrome from the AUR and it was like night and day. It snapped open immediately and everything has been buttery smooth. Now I go to install Alacritty so I can figure out why this annoying pop-up keeps notifying me, I kid you not every 3-6 seconds telling me I am connected to my built in audio. I run into the Authentication Failed message. All of that magic stolen from me. I’m not ready to give up on it, but not sure how to fix it either.
EDIT: Just wanted to add, I have done the full upgrade. I feel like maybe it has something to do with auto-login, because I hit keychain problems on other distros when I turned that on.
