Hi there,
I was having an issue with updating my system via Pacman. Pacman threw an error while attempting to install updates (via sudo pacman -Syu).
It mentioned that it could not upgrade icu due to a dependancy of electron25.
I looked up this error and found a post mentioning to run “pacman -Rd --nodeps icu”, which I did.
I am aware that I should have looked up (and fully understand) what this does (I since stumbled over “pacman -Rd” in the Arch Wiki, where it said to avoid it), but I have real problems with my inhibition and focus (which I will discuss with my therapist).
Anyways, after rebooting the system, I no longer have access to my DE and pacman broke.
It says “pacman: error while loading shared libraries: libicuuc.so.74: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”
I had created a snapshot of my system beforehand, but Timeshift fails to launch with the same error as pacman.
Does anyone have an idea on how to reinstall icu?
My system:
Kernel: 6.9.1-arch1-1
DE: Plasma 6
File system: BTRFS
Bootloader: GRUB
Coming here with help as I just had this exact same issue and struggled to fix it as nothing I tried worked because of the exact same error you have.
You probably need only to ICU 74.2 source code, but I would get ICU 75.1 too to make sure everything works as intended.
You won’t be able to access these files with any browser if your DE is broken, so you need to use wget to install these files.
try doing this with the 74 first so you do not waste time intalling the newest icu, you will get it from pacman later anyways if everything is fixed
After downloading the source code with wget create a temporary directory and put the tar file in there, then unpack it with “tar xvf” and then cd into “icu” and run:
cd source
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
ICU 74.2 should install into /usr and now you should be able to update your system