update: yay after reboot and login KDE wont start up and i have no desktop.....its allmost 4am and i am 5h into this update
Seriously. I used Manjaro for a short period about 5 or 6 years ago but ran into so many issues with it. Vanilla Arch on the other hand is very forgiving in my experience. I have a second desktop PC with Arch installed and I only update that machine once every couple of months when I actually need to use it. In my four years of doing that I never had an update break my system.
I've used and come back to Arch for nearly 8 years now and Manjaro has always been a broken distribution and genuinely gives Arch a bad rep.
Arch has always been a very stable daily driver for me, never breaking and never having issues with it. I'm always confused on what people are doing when they have issues with their entire distro breaking, especially since you pick all your packages and such anyways.
I've had a few breaking changes in 10 years of dailying Arch across multiple devices.
Most egregiously one time a PAM update included a new PAM config... which got applied as .pacnew, but the new PAM config was critical and I could not login with a cryptic error message.
That probably took me a solid hour to figure out, because config file conflicts is probably pacman's weakest point. At least apt starts conflict resolution by default.
I don't think in this specific case it does, though. I had similar problems with a completely different distribution. I'm convinced that it's an upstream Qt or KDE issue where broken caches or changed cache formats don't get automatically invalidated and rebuild. In the case I vividly remember some lower level graphics library was updated and everything seemed to run fine but for some (and only some) users it resulted in Qt or some KDE component not being able to parse the cache any longer. After some research (under Gnome) I wrote a small script that quit Plasma and KWin, deleted all the caches (icon, font, ...) and then launched KWin and Plasma again. Worked fine and came handy on a couple of further occasions.
Ideally, you should use Pamac (if you're doing CLI), not Pacman, to update Manjaro. Haven't used Manjaro in a while, but this is gospel most of the time.
EDIT: clarity
Is it because of the offset between the main packages and the AUR? Man, that's such a bad decision.
Edit: they seem to be using yay as the package manager.
From the Gentoo user and Debian/RedHat server admin perspective the whole AUR mess with its 20 package managers just for that and its different way to install stuff compared to the main distro packages has always made me stop Arch-based distros whenever I gave them a try. Why can't they do what Gentoo and Debian and RedHat distros do and have one unified packaging system for all packages?
You can use pacman and makepkg for everything if you want. Alternative tools are for convenience.
On the other binary distros I don't have to compile third party packages myself though. And on Gentoo I use ebuilds for everything and they are super-easy to write, especially if you have a similar package as a starting point.
use pamac and always read the post on the forum.
you should have the thing in the panel that links you to the post of each update. (https://forum.manjaro.org/t/app-matray-manjaro-announcements-tray-app-the-new-one/69066)
i'm on manjaro from ~4 years ago. it never broke... still a couple of times i had to restore a timeshift backup.
i will switch to nixos once i learned enough of it.
Thank you for clearly illustrating how I felt when I (somehow) tanked my Linux GUI on Ubuntu 22. Terror cat is exactly the right mood.
Ah, just like me while at Uni and breaking my Arch installs. Can’t believe that was ten years ago. Good times.