Will not boot with plasma after botched i3 install

I tried to install i3 but failed miserably (as has been my experience with pine book and manjaro so far).

The machine would not boot and freezes on login. I entered a TTY with alt-ctrl-f3 (I didn’t even know about TTYs b4 this).

I did pamac uninstall i3 and I removed the folder /.config/i3. But i3 is still hanging around. It prompts me to login with i3 still but obviously does not work.

I was using plasma before this. Not sure if i3 is a full desktop or just a window manager but I’d be happy to get back to plasma again.

Any attempt to install from pamac or pacman (like a fresh install of plasma) fails with failed to retrieve some files, as does ping an curl, so I don’t think I have internet in the TTY.

How can I restore my brickd machine to something that works?

You might want to print your pacman log to see all of what you removed. ex:

less /var/log/pacman.log

Then you should be able to remove everything you need to and reinstall any removed packages, even without internet as they should still be in your local cache. ex:

sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/plasma-desktop-5.20.2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

i3 is a window manager (WM).

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It looks like when it installed i3 it removed plasma - thanks to the log file. I was able to reinstall it with the excellent advice you provided and now I am logged in! Wow.

I thought a window manager would work on top a desktop? I wanted something that would work with plasma, not in place of it. I tried kwin but none of the shortcuts worked (mostly I think b/c I don’t know what the meta key is). I guess i3 is not for me.

In fact I have no business using Manjaro at all. I’m going to have to install Ubuntu or Debian which is more at my level.

Thanks alot!!

I think you can use i3 with Plasma … but it depends on how you do it (I havent tried).

The Meta key is usually the ‘windows’ key.

I am not sure any of the above has anything to do with Manjaro/Arch … well … the ease of recovery probably was thanks to superior package management :wink:. But Plasma is going to work like Plasma in whatever case. And the Meta key will still be the Meta key.

Manjaro happens to offer a rather wide range of DEs and WMs if Plasma is not your style.

Cheers and Good luck whatever you do.

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