Plasma workspace installation problem

[pinata]

I turned on my laptop and while booting up on Manjaro I got this weird error that I’ve been trying to solve it till now with the help of other similar threads on the internet.

The error says:

The following installation problem was detected while trying to start Plasma:
No write access to $HOME directory (/home/alex).
Plasma is unable to start.

It seems like I can use only the system default apps.
My home directory is located on a shared SSD partition with my Windows. The partition filesystem is NTFS so there are no problems with the r/w permissions. Even though, what I found weird is that when I tried to delete a file from /home/alex/ I wasn’t able to do it.

I freshly installed both Manjaro and Windows on different partitions made for only their system files and they are sharing a big partition for everything else. Yesterday, everything worked just fine while I was trying to set my VS Code debugger for hours and eventually giving up and installing CLion from AUR.

[Aragorn]

Welcome to the forum!

@pinata

My home directory is located on a shared SSD partition with my Windows. The partition filesystem is NTFS so there are no problems with the r/w permissions.

There’s your problem. Your /home must be on a native Linux filesystem such as ext4, btrfs, jfs or xfs, and not on NTFS, because NTFS does not store UNIX/POSIX file ownership and permissions. This means that when an NTFS or other non-POSIX filesystem is mounted into the tree, its file ownership and permissions need to be emulated in the kernel’s virtual filesystem layer at mount time, and cannot be altered in real-time, nor can they be set for individual files and directories.

Please read through these two long but very explanatory tutorials…

[Tutorial] Understanding and working with UNIX filesystems and permissions

Difficulty: ★★★☆☆ Note: This post is meant as a tutorial. Please do not post on this thread regarding any problems you’re having with permissions, but start a new thread instead. Thank you. PREAMBLE: THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND If you are new to the world of GNU/Linux ─ and especially if you come from the Microsoft Windows ecosystem ─ then you will undoubtedly have already noticed that GNU/Linux handles permissions and storage volumes quite differently from what you might be used to …

[Tutorial] Working with additional 'drives'

Difficulty: ★★☆☆☆ 1. INTRODUCTION Microsoft Windows started its life as a graphical user interface on top of MS-DOS, a 16-bit single-user, single-tasking operating system that in turn originated as 86DOS, an unauthorized 16-bit rewrite (by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer) of Digital Research’s originally 8-bit CP/M operating system. Both CP/M and MS-DOS were at the time developed for computers that did not support any other storage media than floppy disks. Considering this legacy, Microsof…

@pinata

I freshly installed both Manjaro and Windows on different partitions made for only their system files and they are sharing a big partition for everything else. Yesterday, everything worked just fine

That will have been a fluke. I’m afraid you’re going to have to repartition your system.

[pinata]

Thank you for your reply. I will look into that.

But, don’t you find it weird that it worked until now? I’ve been using Manjaro like this for a couple of days.

[Aragorn]

@pinata

But, don’t you find it weird that it worked until now?

No, because like I said, that might have been a fluke as the result of a combination of things, one of which is the unreliability and unpredictability of the ntfs3 kernel driver, which — just as an FYI — will eventually also end up corrupting your NTFS volumes. A better alternative is to use the ntfs-3g driver, which is fully functional.

But even then still, your /home must be on a Linux-native filesystem, because it relies upon UNIX/POSIX permissions, file ownership and special file types — such as symbolic links — which are not supported in NTFS.

What’s also important to note here is that if you dual-boot with Windows, then you must disable Windows Fast Boot and Hybrid Sleep, because this leaves your Windows filesystems in an open state, which the Linux kernel will see as filesystem damage, and it will thus mount said filesystems as read-only to prevent further damage. And Secure Boot must of course also be disabled, because Manjaro does not support that.

The best and least cumbersome approach for sharing files between GNU/Linux and MICROS~1 Windows is to use a shared partition formatted as exfat or vfat (FAT32), and to have this partition mounted to a directory (“folder”) inside your $HOME — for instance, ~/Documents/Shared or ~/Documents/Data — and to set up this mount as static, i.e. by way of an entry in /etc/fstab, as opposed to relying on the automagic of udisks2.

Again, and not to toot my own horn, but those two tutorials I’ve posted above explain everything into great detail. So take your time to read through them, and then implement things on your system accordingly. It may even be handy if you have a second computer, so that you can look at the tutorials while reinstalling the other machine.