How to solve manjaro different login, missing plasma desktop package

If you’re suddenly presented with a different login screen, and can’t login to your manjaro installation, here is how you can solve the issue.

First of all, inspect the latest activity logged by pacman:

less /var/log/pacman.log

If you see anything suspicious (like “removing” packaging), especially those related to plasma*, that’s most likely where the problem is.

Connectivity

If you’re using Ethernet you should already be connected to the internet.

Try it out by updating the system packages:

sudo pacman -Syu

If you’re getting errors, e.g you’re not connected to the internet, you can use nmtui (network manager text user interface):

sudo nmtui

You’ll be presented the various network connections available.

Select the one you’re interested in, authenticate and connect.

Now you should be able to update the system packages with sudo pacman -Syu.

Reinstalling plasma

The issue I had was the following:

• removed some packages I didn’t use through Software center
• apparently, somehow, plasma\* packages were removed too…

To solve the issue, I simple reinstalled the whole plasma packages.

sudo pacman -Sy plasma

You could probably also get away with just installing plasma-desktop, but I haven’t tried it.

Now reboot the system with sudo shutdown -r now and you should be able to login as usual.