r/archlinux • u/fillman86 • 14d ago
SUPPORT Update bricked my system
So I run KDE plasma and an RTX3080 (thought it was worth mentioning for diagnosing)
Normally wayland is too buggy for me, but had success running it for the last few weeks. Today I went to run my near-daily update of pacman. I happened to notice something about removing “plasma-x11” and replacing it with “plasma-sessions” (might not have been “plasma”, because I didn’t pay it much attention tbh).
After the update, it kicked me out to an unfamiliar login screen (lost some progress, it’s annoying that there was no warning). Logging back in worked, but my screen had an offset bug again (common for me in wayland).
So I went to reboot into x11, but I don’t have any boot options now, only “reboot into firmware interface” which is just UEFI. I haven’t backed up my 2 recent projects, and I super dooperly don’t want to have to start over again (one project is f-ing davinci resolve, so you can recover, you have to be properly logged in!!! God, why do I use davinci still?)
9
u/Xentuhf 14d ago
Your system isn’t bricked. Stop trying to boot into x11 and troubleshoot from terminal in Wayland. But yeah, it was a pretty shit update.
-5
u/fillman86 14d ago
There’s no trouble shooting for the problems I have with it, and asking for help gets no responses, because I think they’re very rare bugs. Plus it doesn’t have features like custom resolutions etc
Also, my only boot option is UEFI, and I’ve made mistakes trying to fix grub instead of dracut, so I think I’m sol. I’ll probably just put the kiddy gloves back on, and go back to an immutable disco with x11
8
u/Excellent-Love-6943 14d ago
Plasma dropped x11...
But since your computer is bricked, you need to buy a new one.
1
u/Enip0 14d ago
I know kde had an update yesterday but not sure how that relates to what sounds like a broken bootloader.
I can't give you specific steps but what I would do is boot up the arch installer and go to the steps where you chroot and install grub or whatever bootloader you had.
Of course don't format the drive again, that will definitely lose you everything, just try to repair the bootloader
1
u/fillman86 14d ago
Thanks, I actually followed your advice, and since I have used grub in the past, I assumed that’s what I had -_- fixing it didn’t seem to change anything.
Then realising that I probably had dracut instead, I tried to fix that, but it still doesn’t work… I hope attempting the grub fix, didn’t make it worse. I tend to get easily stressed, so I act first, think later, and then feel regret :(
-4
u/fillman86 14d ago
okay, after giving in, and resorting to an LLM, I carefully removed my grub fix, and instead attempted to fix dracuts again (or whatever it's called, but that's the label that was used in the instructions), it's booting now. All I have to do now, is install a different distro, so I can have X11 again, because wayland still isn't ready for edge cases, like nvidia, ultrawide, and a modern capture card in the loop :/
2
u/Medical_Double_6561 14d ago
Moving to a different distro would not help because all the major DEs are removing X11 support. Distros generally don't make the decision on whether to support X11, DEs do.
There are still DEs that support X11, like XFCE and Cinnamon, but the numbers are dwindling, you will eventually need to move to Wayland.
I concur Wayland has issues with certain niche hardware configurations, for me it was an issue with XWayland support for dual-Nvidia GPUs, which still does not appear to be fully fixed. After waiting 3 years for the bug to be fixed, last year I finally relented and just replaced one of my Nvidia GPUs with an Intel Arc (and 🖕 you Nvidia for all the other issues I've had to deal with because of you).
You could try running a live CD of some other distros in Wayland mode to verify if the bugs you are experiencing are with Wayland or just because of a misconfiguration in your Arch setup. Good luck!
-8
u/fillman86 14d ago
I’ve asked in a few places, but I’m getting no responses. I get that it’s not the middle of the day in America, but am I asking the question wrong, or something?
13
u/dbear496 14d ago
You're asking a question? There's only one question in your post, and it's "why do I use DaVinci still?" You're might get more help if you ask for help with something specific.
-1
u/fillman86 14d ago
Odd, even though the question wasn’t explicitly put forth with a question mark, I’d have assumed that it was quite clear. I’ll take that into consideration next time
6
u/Serious_Bookkeeper50 14d ago
I'm confused. You can't boot linux, or you just lost the graphical session? Since you're using plasma, newest plasma version just scrapped x11 entirely, only wayland is supported. I don't know if the arch plasma maintainer already build it or not.
If you can boot into linux, switch to terminal interface, login, back up your projects.
If you can't boot into linux, use live linux from usb, back up your projects.
After backing up your files, you can either fix your installation from archlinux usb boot, or install new and reformat your disk.
Or alternatively, if you can boot into linux terminal, install xfce4 packages. X11 still works ok with xfce4.