EDIT: I kinda solved it by installing Wayland (on my Nvidia card, Ouch!) to replace Xorg. Not sure if this is gonna last though. Perhaps Manjaro is the one I'm gonna throw out FIRST if anything happens from now on.
What should be the first line of defense? Timeshift?
This happened after I installed AUR package masterpdfeditor and 2 applications from github (some hashing algorithm programs, I think they were "Dilithium" and "Latice-based-cryptography-main", one of them was provided by NIST.)
If using GUI: I login, black screen for few seconds, then back at login screen.
If going to ctrl+alt+f2, login successful, then startx, see picture provided (higher quality).
I tried adding a new user, but result is the same.
I have a live usb to do the Timeshift. (I can also chroot if necessary... But I'm not extremely professional)
This issue is more than likely caused by Manjaro itself.
So yeah, probably would not have experienced this issue on EndeavourOS, that's right.
The issue is caused by OP disabling lightdm and using a custom X session. It would've backfired on any distro on the planet, because they messed up something in that session.
I agree that manjaro is shit, but "your distro is shit" is not helpful advice for someone who wants to get their graphical session back.
I hate to admit it but perhaps it is not such a bad advice...
For my personal curiosity, how on Earth did you end up uninstalling lightdm and using startx? Did you follow a tutorial? Where do you even get this kind of advice?
For future reference what you did is not for beginners and it would have messed up any distro. It has nothing to do with Manjaro.
Try an immutable distro, maybe that will stand up better to this kind of thing.
I didn't uninstall lightdm. I was under the impression that startx would just start the GUI, regardless of what "engine" it's running on.
startx makes a new X server, which uses the programs you put in ~/.xinitrc and the X server depends on the first program in there that runs in the foreground. If that program dies it doesn't start, the X server doesn't either.
Of course it's not, hence why I said "one of your steps".
As in, get your data back, and then drop Manjaro.
so why would Envdeavor not experience this issue? Does it simply not have the AUR? That's very unfortunate. Or are they simply not holding back like in ~~Arch~~ Manjaro?
I'll assume you mean Manjaro here -- Arch doesn't hold back packages.
And yes, Manjaro holds back packages from the main Arch repos which can break compatibility with the AUR.
EndeavourOS is pretty much literally a GUI installer for Arch.
ouch, yes, my bad
I think I kinda solved it by installing Wayland. It seems to work, even on my proprietary nvidia drivers
Except (1) that's not a thing that really happens and (2) what happened to OP was done by themselves not by an AUR package.
It is a unmodified Arch install that has a prepackaged setup, so you get a running desktop very easily and get the full.power and configurability of Arch
therr is nothing wring with AUR the problem is manjaro holding off arch packages causes massive dependency problems
OP's problem was not caused by an AUR package. They're leaving out some details about how they ruined their X setup themselves.
no idea what caused it. The other 2 apps I installed were (if I remember correctly) "Dilithium” and “Latice-based-cryptography-main”. But since I installed Wayland (instead of using Xorg), everything seems to work now...