Last night I had a heart attack. I ruined my arch distro setup and couldn’t
boot it. It all started when I saw that the plasma-meta package had a lot of
games and I was running low on hard drive so I wanted to clean up what i
thought was unnecessary. I opened the KDE start menu and started with the
software groups in there. I don’t remember the exact command I used, but it
seemed to be pacman -Rnc and something else I am not sure, and finally the
package I wanted to remove. I started from the games group and everything was
fine. Then went to support tools, then office tools,…
Everything seemed fine. But unfortunately things were not as I expected. Somme widgets on the desktop stopped working. I decided to shut down the computer and go home. After dinner i sat at the table and turned on the computer. But oh no, things were clearly not working at all. I couldn’t get to the login screen, maybe the kernel had finished loading and was loading more system services but it stopped for a long time. I switched to tty2 with ctrl alt f2 and I could still log in to my account. At that time I didn’t know what I did wrong, I just knew the next day i had important work to do and I needed this machine to work. I could use the terminal only for coding but not for chatting with colleagues. by my guesswork i changed sddm config and tried between wayland and x11 but no go. Worse I made it ugly. I lost access to tty2. Now I cant edit from inside. imagine in the middle of the night you are not doing anything useful, but have to fix the stupid mistake you just made.
After a few reboots I still cant get into terminal. So I have to go get my spare usb to boot from usb. It took me a while because I had previously hidden the usb from the boot menu, and now I had to rummage around to find that configuration again. After a while of trying, I was able to boot from the usb. it felt a bit more relieved at that moment. Then i tried arch-chroot to root and restore the error but after several attempts to install the configurations it still didn’t work.
Finally gemini suggested reinstalling the kernel and I thought it was reasonable so I did it. I had to take screenshots with my phone and ask gemini to analyze the error then review that analysis and make a decision. Finally after many hours of effort i restored my computer. Overall everything is fine. Only the sound doesn’t work. Some widgets don’t work anymore so I decided to delete them. The most important thing is that it doesn’t affect my work. Today I solved the sound problem by reinstalling the sub packages that I found important in the plasma-meta package. The most important thing is always keeping a backup USB.