Things keep breaking

General system Newbie
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Good evening,

For the last few years i have been using Zorin OS for the most part. I liked it so much that i purchased the Pro version for it. When Zorin 18 released i found out that i had to buy it again, and thats the moment i hopped over to Endeavor OS.

I’ve been using it for a few months now and I’ve been very happy with it. From then till now i would say it has been relatively okay issues wise, but the last few days i feel like all ive done is troubleshooting.

I- by no means have come here to hate on Endeavor OS, I’ve come to like it a lot actually. I use it as a daily driver and i am curious if there’s something fundimental that i am doing very wrong.

Kernel Panic

I updated the system a few weeks ago, and bumped into `Kernel Panic` - which is a first timer for me. I downgraded the kernel version to 6.18.x.x something and that resolved it.

Broken App: System Monitor

After updating my system a few days ago, and rebooting. I wasn’t able to open it at all, it crashes on startup. After some chats back and forth with Claude, it was able to have that fixed.

Broken App: Konsole

Earlier after a coding session, i was going to check the terminal to find something in fastfetch. As it turns out, the konsole app is crashing now as well. How does one fix the system without the god damn terminal >_>

I used EOS as my daily driver, and now is the time to decide if i want to fix it or distrohop to something else. I would like to say it has been really nice to use KDE Plasma and will definitely keep using that DE, its awesome. But i will need something that just works. A team that prioritises stability, maybe Arch just isn’t for me.. :sob:

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I would try make a new user and see if the same is occurring there with the system monitor and konsole to help rule things out. I may not be able to help much more (who knows things come to me at times and other times my mind is blank) but it will help others figure things out too.

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The three issues you’ve described I’ve not encountered personally, and yet all of those things I would have done or used often in the last few weeks on my various systems.

I’m not sure what you’re experiencing is “normal”, which I offer as hope that maybe you can expect the experience to be smoother.

EndeavourOS/Arch is a bleeding edge rolling release distro, so yes sometimes there are issues. Generally you’ll hear about them in the forums, and sometimes it’s a hurdle we all jump together. I’ve relied on EndeavourOS for business tasks for years now though, despite that.

I trust its reliability. But if you need something even more reliable, there are other distros that may be better suited?

What ever your choice, you’re welcome here. You don’t have to use EndeavourOS or Arch to hang out with us :wink: :+1:

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I’m more pragmatic and less nice than Bink and Smokey. However, if you’ve seen this level of issues within the last few weeks, I’d strongly suggest you’re doing something wrong or have failing hardware.
Like the others have suggested, if there’s an app breakage you’ll see others talking about it, and I haven’t.
Unfortunately, I can’t magically intuit what you may have done wrong, the possibilities are too vast.
Edit: On the positive side (or neutral?), if you haven’t broken at least one Arch-based system, then you must be doing something wrong :slight_smile: It always takes a few sacrificial victims to get your minds doing the right things.

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I’ve had a couple more waking hours and some caffeine, let me put some salient points down that might help. Yes, I know I could have edited the above post, but the problem with that is lack of notifications and thus the addition can be missed :frowning:

  1. This isn’t Windows or even Ubuntu, don’t download random stuff from random places. All your software needs are in the arch-ecosystem (including the AUR, though I would steer away from there if at all posible). Don’t add any other repo than those already in the pacman.conf at the time of installation.

  2. All installation and upgrade activities are one of these (pacman -Syu, paru, yay (I’m less familiar with yay), I use the other two). No other installation nor upgrade tool need apply. All upgrades are NOT partial (ie always -Syu). Oh, and when pacman gives you output, do read it..sometimes there are important things that you are required to do (like running grub-install) manually.

  3. If you’re having to use root level access frequently, you’re probably doing something wrong. This just actually occurred to me recently, that there’s a lot less root needed than some people seem to think. Every SINGLE time you use root authority think of why you’re doing it and question it (I realize with lack of knowledge you don’t even know enough to question correctly..sorry, that’s true). The only strong/frequent exception is running pacman to do upgrades or installations, at least in my use case.

  4. If you want a stable system, don’t be installing stuff every day (corollary of #3), this isn’t work flow, this is experimentation and leads down a dark path of system instability (imo). Get it where you need it to be and just use it.

I’m sure there’s some more, but I can’t think of anything right now..maybe more after more caffeine.

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I have a good history when it comes to kernel panics. Most importantly is figuring out why it happens, and there is a message on the big blue screen on what happened to cause the kernel panic.
Like for excample:

Timeout: not all CPUs entered broadcast exception handler

This can give a good hint on what is happening and how to fix it. That is basically similar to Windows.

Also, personally I wouldn’t have downgraded. I would have installed the LTS-Kernel. That makes that you have 2 kernels to choose from on boot, which can be helpful in many cases. + the current LTS-Kernel is 6.18.x.

Would be nice to know what “fixed” your issue. And what you did to fix it.
I don’t know how often we had it on this forum where someone said that they used an Ai to fix their issue, and then had a broken system as other things stopped working…
Ai is not always a good Linux guru, better to ask forum, as there are many gurus (not me though, I am no guru :rofl:)

Both system monitor and Konsole are kde apps. Maybe there is a connection?
Its hard to help if we don’t know what you did..

Also there are maybe 2.5 ways to fix the system without the terminal, that is 1 using as much GUI as you can, being that if you need to change configs (if that is needed) or whatever you can use dolphin and then open the file with Kate (that is if these don’t crash as well).
2 would be to arch-chroot. Meaning you use the endeavouros iso and access this installation of yours. There you can use the terminal (as everything will practically be terminal).
0.5 would be, reinstall (last resort) or if you had, use backup/snapshot to roll back… Very handy.

So yeah more information would be nice, like inxi or journalctl.. But yes, hard to give without terminal. So information about what you did to fix system monitor may be helpful.

Well, as it is, noone else has Konsole failing as of right now. I remember that system monitor once crashed whenever I wanted to open it but that was months ago, and fixed itself the next day where an update came in.
But yes, if you need pure stability where things just work, because you need the system for work related things or just don’t have time to troubleshoot, yes maybe something non arch based is better for you.

Or, if you still want to use endeavouros and stick with us, maybe using LTS and a decent backup/snapshot strategy where you just simply can roll back within 2 minutes after a update that makes something not working, also works for you :wink:
Who knows, I am just throwing this idea in here.

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Hello again everyone,

I have to say, i did not expect this many answers on such a problematic scenario, this is starting to feel like an intervention :sob:

There are so much written here, many good points so i will quote and reply to the most important one’s.

Very much possible, i had a look at distrowatch last night and cachy os seems very interesting. Other than that one, if i decide to return to ubuntu-based systems - i may give kubuntu a try.

Its not that i find arch hard, i do like it a lot more than i do ubuntu-based systems. Installing packages seems a lot more reliable and easier on arch. I tend to end up with broken packages more often than not on ubuntu-based. Anyways. I’m yapping.

I heard this on Zorin forums too, appreciate it gang :blue_heart:

I am leaning towards me doing something fatally wrong, has to be the only explanation for all this. As i said i use endeavor os as a daily driver, so i don’t go around messing with stuff for absolutely no reason.

Haha yeah, well said :rofl:

While we’re on the topic of package managers. I mostly use yay, as i feel it seems the easiest to use. Perhaps i should give pacman a try, i don’t think i have ever used it lmao

When the system monitor app crapped itself, Claude AI suggested many things to troubleshoot. The one change it recommended me do to the system was to downgrade various qtX packages to a more stable version. My understanding of QT is that its the backbone of front-end GUI applications, so it made sense at that point.

For those of you that are not technically challenged like myself, I’ll mention what i did to fix this. I’m proud to say that i did not use AI to fix this. I think it might be wise of me to understand arch when troubleshooting instead of just trusting AI it knows what its doing. It clearly doesn’t.

The Fix

I was going to make a backup of some game files and documents this morning to prepare for kubuntu, thats when i found out i also could not open Dolphin either. Thats where something clicked, there was a change i remember vividly from a few days ago. So i entered terminal TTY, which it surprisingly was not able to open either (it opened it, but terminal was not accessible).

Then i installed Blackbox and was able to run commands from there instead. I checked command history and found the command i used to downgrade and blacklist qt packages.

sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf

There’s obviously a bunch of lines in there, a few days ago i added (i commented it out a few minutes ago):

#IgnorePkg = qt6-base qt6-svg qt6-5compat qt6-connectivity qt6-declarative qt6-imageformats qt6-location qt6-multimedia qt6-multimedia-ffmpeg qt6-positioning qt6-quick3d qt6-quicktimeline qt6-sensors qt6-shadertools

After commenting it out, i updated all the packages on my system. Everything works now. I think i will use EOS for a while longer, and we’ll see how it treats me.

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It does make sense as a temporary measure, “downgrade-track the news-update back when your issue is fixed”. Otherwise, you’re in for partial upgrades for the very core of your GUI. HUGE NO-NO.

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Yes, you just illustrated two of my ‘don’t do it’ things.
You applied root w/o consideration (because it wasn’t a good thing to do), which resulted in a partial upgrade situation.
I’m glad undoing it put you back in ‘it’s not breaking’ condition.

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This would make sense to konsole not working and system monitor, they use a few of these packages as dependencies.

What I would suggest to do next time is just ask for a hand here, people are often willing to give a hand.

Glad you got things working again.

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I’ve had some experience from other linux forums where they bash down on people asking for help. That was the initial reason why i tend to not ask for help around these forums, so these answers ive gotten was really unexpected.

Everyone is so friendly around here, i will definitely ask around for pointers next time. Thanks everyone for taking the time out of your day :blue_heart:

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Oh, I’ll get you (bash) if it’s something that would be easily searchable and decipherable and it just looks like you are lazy.
However, as Smokey said we’ll try to help if it looks like you’re trying to learn.
And this wouldn’t have (in my opinion) been searchable…well sorta, Arch Wiki :0

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Yer I think someone posted about something like this around when I first joined the forum, I think they called them help vampires.

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You know…I’ve used those words :wink:

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This doesn’t make sense to me. I have all of these packages with the system up to date. It is very difficult to know what your problem actually was. You haven’t detailed it out properly right from the start. You talk about ZorinOS. Okay you had a kernel panic but offered no boot logs, no system hardware logs etc. I just don’t see that not updating these packages is the answer because we don’t even know what the problem was. Yes it does take using the terminal at times in order to fix things. This is not ZorinOS which is based on Ubuntu. Totally different than an Arch based distro.

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The mention of Zorin OS was simply to clarify that i made the switch from Zorin to Endeavor OS and have been happy with that.

I completely agree. The problem was stated in the first post, but im sure you’re referring to the cause of the broken apps. I still don’t know what caused it, and the fact that it is fixed now makes absolutely no sense.

It does indeed take a terminal to fix things. Thats atleast usually how i do things. I’m completely aware that endeavor os is not based on ubuntu.

Not sure what you meant by this comment. I wasn’t comparing Zorin OS to Endeavor OS if thats what it was. Zorin was simply a short mention about their paywall, my reason for switching.

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I was just pointing out that Ubuntu and Arch are completely different. So ZorinOS based on Ubuntu and EOS being Arch is quite opposite. They don’t even break the same. :rofl:

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I’ve never thought of it that way :sweat_smile:

But it’s true :wink:

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