Pamac issue and OS suddenly slower

[bimethelime]

Hello,
Ive been using my install of manjaro cinnamon for about a year now and after the initial configuration issues I got help with in the forums, everything has been perfectly fine. Now recently overnight my Add/Remove Software page looks like this and is practically unusable

If I toggle the large text accessibility option then I can actually read things.

But there is no access to the AUR and most people seem to say I just need to toggle the option for AUR in the prefferences tab, but I have nothing like that in my preferences menu.

My OS has become much slower, and several apps like webcord and steam simply won’t open, and anything that will open takes between 60 seconds to 5 minutes before it starts. I have tried upgrading the kernel, downgrading the kernel, and repairing the install of my apps through the terminal, but I don’t seem to be getting anywhere so I was hoping someone could help me out here.

Thank you!

[Aragorn]

@bimethelime

Ive been using my install of manjaro cinnamon for about a year now and after the initial configuration issues I got help with in the forums, everything has been perfectly fine. Now recently overnight my Add/Remove Software page looks like this and is practically unusable

First important question: is your system up to date? And if so, did you merge your .pacnew files?

Second question: do you have xdg-desktop-portal-gnome installed? If so, remove it and install xdg-desktop-portal-gtk instead.

sudo pacman -Rdd xdg-desktop-portal-gnome && sudo pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

As a bonus, you might be better off with the GTK3 version of Pamac. The GTK4 version requires the installation of plugins for accessing anything other than the official Manjaro repositories.

sudo pacman -Rdd pamac-gtk && sudo pacman -S pamac-gtk3

Lastly, all of this was mentioned on the pertinent update announcement threads, so it pays to regularly visit the forum and subscribe to notifications for Stable Updates.

[bimethelime]

I’m using the latest recommended version of the kernel

but as far as merging the .pacnew files, I haven’t done that yet.

I have xdg-desktop-portal-gnome installed and im currently going through your steps to get xdg-desktop-portal-gtk installed instead.

I’m a bit confused about this though because my install of pamac was able to pull from the AUR just fine before and then it was suddenly unreadable and lost the ability to access AUR out of nowhere. I’m not really sure why or what happened but I’ll do a .pacnew merge and do the gtk install, then get GTK4 pamac and I’ll report back.

[Aragorn]

@bimethelime

I’m using the latest recommended version of the kernel

That’s not the latest one. The latest 6.1 LTS kernel is 6.1.44-1. In other words, your system is not up to date yet.

sudo pacman -Syu

@bimethelime

but as far as merging the .pacnew files, I haven’t done that yet.

You should. One of the important changes is that the community repo was merged into the extra repo, and as such, community is now empty and should be removed from /etc/pacman.conf.

Pacnew and Pacsave files

A .pacnew file may be created during a package upgrade to avoid overwriting a file which already exists. A .pacsave file may be created during a package removal, or by a package installation of a package that was removed. These files require manual intervention from the user and it is good practice to handle them regularly. The program pacdiff can help manage this process. For example, here is what it looks like when the /etc/default/grub grub file has changed:

sudo DIFFPROG=diff pacdiff|result=
==> pacnew file found for /etc/default/grub
:: (V)iew, (S)kip, (R)emove pacnew, (O)verwrite with pacnew, (Q)uit: [v/s/r/o/q]

• V shows the differences between the two files
• S skips to the next change and allows you to deal with it later or manually
• R keeps your existing file and delete the new file
• O overwrites the existing file with the new file
• Q quits the process without making further changes

Unfortunately, there is no perfect road map for how to deal with these files. If you keep the original config file, and the syntax has changed, the program may stop working or fail to use the existing config. If you remove the original file and use the new file without any changes, all your configuration settings can be overwritten. Sometimes, you need to combine pieces from the new and old files to make everything to work. In these situations it is better to integrate the files manually.

@bimethelime

I have xdg-desktop-portal-gnome installed and im currently going through your steps to get xdg-desktop-portal-gtk installed instead.

Good. xdg-desktop-portal-gnome causes huge delays in application start times on desktops other than GNOME.

@bimethelime

I’m a bit confused about this though because my install of pamac was able to pull from the AUR just fine before and then it was suddenly unreadable and lost the ability to access AUR out of nowhere. I’m not really sure why or what happened but I’ll do a .pacnew merge and do the gtk install, then get GTK4 pamac and I’ll report back.

The GTK4 version of pamac was prematurely pushed out and now requires the installation of extra packages for AUR access, as well as for FlatPaks and possibly also for Snaps. The GTK3 version still works as before.

[bimethelime]

This seemed to work perfectly. Thank you so much!

• I quickly got myself up to date with 6.1.44-1

• Reverting to the GTK3 version of pamac put it right back to what I remember, and it can access the AUR just fine.

• Removing xdg-desktop-portal-gnome and using xdg-desktop-portal-gtk totally got rid of the huge delay when opening apps.

I havent merged the .pacnew files as it seems like this will be a bit more involved, but as far as I can tell, everything is up and running like before.

[Aragorn]

Well, you will also need to update your AUR packages, of course, because pacman doesn’t do that.

pamac update --force-refresh --aur --devel