Yardy Sardley

A really common issue with sway is that it doesn’t run as a login shell, so none of your .profile or other environment settings get sourced when you login. I think that might be the problem here.

Try closing your sway session, then login to a tty and run sway. If the qt themes work properly then it’s definitely an environment issue.

Fellow Arch user here (btw). It’s exactly the same as building AUR packages. Clone a git repo containing a PKGBUILD, use makepkg to build it, and pacman to install it. The nice thing is you can host a repo of your built packages and install them on other systems really easily. The big downside is that dependency management is not automated, so it will take some time and annoyance to map out what packages you need to build and in what order, if you want a fully source-bootstrapped system.

I second the wayland option. Then you at least have a working gui with all your settings and recent work intact while you try to find the glitch in your Xorg install.

There’s openSUSE tumbleweed. It’s rpm based like fedora and it’s rolling-release like arch. I don’t know what the 3rd party/nonfree software situation is like. Maybe someone else can chime in on that front.

I will add, as an arch user, I think you could easily tweak your current system to be less annoying with the updates, but I realize that’s not the question you’re asking so feel free to disregard that.

Depending what format of audio, you can embed the image into the metadata

I mean, technically Linux is still at 2.6, they’ve just been making up version numbers for the last 20 years or so.

You wasted 3 hours of your life so far lol

But yeah. I find the most mysterious and time-consuming of problems are usually caused by a very minor detail that is so obvious it gets overlooked immediately.

And even if you know that’s probably the case, sometimes your brain will just discard information that isn’t consistent with its assumed reality, and it tells you the piece of code you just read is fine when it’s obviously not.

Troubleshooting/debugging is fun.

This happened to me a few weeks ago and the pain is still fresh. Please tell us your data is safely backed up, OP.

I’m trying to figure out what demographic would be downvoting this to hell. Arch users getting triggered by a clickbait title? Arch haters trying to cope with a somewhat charitable take on arch users? Or are we all just downvoting for the meme?

The only difference between those two versions of linux is that the new one was built with a newer version of gcc. That doesn’t really narrow the problem down, though. As far as I’m aware, emergency mode is caused by either a kernel panic or a failure to mount a needed filesystem. I’m leaning towards a corrupted kernel, since it doesn’t sound like you changed your fstab or had any problem mounting /. I would run fsck -f on your boot partition, then try to re-download and reinstall the new package.

If that doesn’t work, then you can add IgnorePkg = linux linux-headers to pacman.conf so you can update without installing the broken package, until you resolve the underlying issue. Or your can install a different kernel altogether.

As for preventing problems in the future, there’s only so much you can do. Check archlinux.org before updating to see if anything requires manual intervention, and pay close attention while running pacman in case something goes wrong. You already seem to know the most important part, which is to keep a set of packages that are certain to work, so you can easily downgrade if a crash does happen.

I decided to switch when windows xp went end-of-life, because my pc was a mid-2000’s era relic that would surely catch fire if it was forced to handle the windows 7/10 bloat. Naturally, I installed Mint on bare metal without doing any research beforehand. Not the best idea, but sometimes it’s fun to jump headfirst into a completely foreign landscape. That said, Cinnamon (the desktop environment of Mint) shares much of its design language with windows, so it’s not really that foreign, as far as the graphical interface is concerned.

What surprised me was just how different the underlying system was, how much more transparent and accessible it was, and how incredibly efficient and versatile the command line could be. Then there’s the broader OSS community, which I think is a fantastic thing to participate in even if you don’t use Linux, but using Linux is certainly a gateway.

I’m not saying Linux is perfect, and it’s probably not for everyone, but it is nice to not be held captive by some monopolistic corporation, who continuously engages in ethically questionable anti-consumer behaviour, in the name of increasingly monetizing their user base. Linux gives power back to the end users, and that’s what makes it worthwhile and important.

It really just comes down to the differences in goals and philosophies between each distribution. Some distros have large curated repositories containing most of everything a normal user would want to use. That’s what people expect from those distros, and people use them because they want that experience. Likewise, people don’t use arch just because it has the AUR. They want a more DIY experience, and arch provides that, with the AUR being an essential part of how it works.

You’re not going to get arch users to switch to ubuntu or whatever by duct-taping an AUR clone onto it. Furthermore, I believe trying to make one distro “to rule them all” that attempts to appeal to every niche would be not only a train wreck technically, but an abomination, antithetical to the principles of the OSS community as well.