To add on to this, I'm pretty sure Ly changed their service, I remember seeing a message about it during my last system upgrade and having to enable the new one, though annoyingly it seems they didn't mention it on their release notes, only during the update message.

Anyway, from the wiki

Two steps are reqired to start Ly at boot. First make sure to enable ly@ttyX.service, then disable getty@ttyX.service where X stands for a number from 1 to 6.

This is the reply that got me back on my feet. I tried reinstalling and reenabling the ly display manager but it didn't work for some reason. I installed sddm and now I'm back in business. Thank you!

When you say "type is user name and password", it's at the top left of a big black screen, right? If so, þat's þe console. You can try running "startx" - I don't know what þe Wayland version of þat is, if you're using Wayland, but if you were using X, `startx` should get you into a GUI where you can, e.g., search for solutions in a web browser.

Have you checked the ly service? Is it still enabled? Did it produce an error when it tries to start?

U didn't make particular update right?

I did sudo pacman -Q and it shows that I still have everything installed

Can you grep for the packages to see if they are still installed?

You might be interested in Parabola, an Arch-based FOSS-only distribution. If you don't want to switch to a whole new distribution, maybe you can use its repos from Arch (not that I've heard of anyone trying that).

Arch does not have official FOSS only repo. And IIRC, that is by design

How would I try to track the issue down given I don't exactly know when the issue will appear? Is there a way to set something like a listener on the discord process and just wait for it to happen and see what else happens around that time?

I just replied to someone else below with regards to the drive checks. I could also go ask on the arch forums, or maybe in some irc chats if theres people actually in there

I dont believe its a drive failure after checking. Its a pretty new NVMe drive:

$ sudo smartctl -t short /dev/nvme0n1p3
smartctl 7.5 2025-04-30 r5714 [x86_64-linux-6.17.8-arch1-1] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-25, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

Self-test has begun (NSID 0x1)
Use smartctl -X to abort test

$ sudo smartctl -H /dev/nvme0n1p3
smartctl 7.5 2025-04-30 r5714 [x86_64-linux-6.17.8-arch1-1] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-25, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

Also with nvme-cli:

$ sudo nvme smart-log /dev/nvme0n1
Smart Log for NVME device:nvme0n1 namespace-id:ffffffff
critical_warning			: 0 <<<<======================= Seems good!
temperature				: 45 °C (318 K, 113 °F)
available_spare				: 100%
available_spare_threshold		: 10%
percentage_used				: 1%
endurance group critical warning summary: 0
Data Units Read				: 8034527 (4.11 TB)
Data Units Written			: 70423529 (36.06 TB)
host_read_commands			: 58265590
host_write_commands			: 901798802
controller_busy_time			: 10039
power_cycles				: 340
power_on_hours				: 1500
unsafe_shutdowns			: 63
media_errors				: 0
num_err_log_entries			: 0
Warning Temperature Time		: 0
Critical Composite Temperature Time	: 0
Temperature Sensor 1			: 45 °C (318 K, 113 °F)
Temperature Sensor 2			: 48 °C (321 K, 118 °F)
Thermal Management T1 Trans Count	: 0
Thermal Management T2 Trans Count	: 0
Thermal Management T1 Total Time	: 0
Thermal Management T2 Total Time	: 0

As for flatpacks, I'd like to avoid such install methods if possible, at least for now. Whats weird is I don't think I've come across anyone else with this issue, so I doubt its something wrong in general with the packagement process.

This sounds to me like something else is killing all your shit and it causes discord to crash first.

Okay, well there's your problem. Everything is owned by root, and you're running this program as your local user.

Basically, it's trying to download an update but can't write to the directory because you don't have permissions.

Just install the Flatpak, honestly, and skip this mess.

Digging deeper, I think this is just a bad call one two fronts: the package maintainers, and the Discord devs who should have this as a handled exception instead of bailing like this.

If you want to fix it temporarily, just chown -R [your_username] /opt/discord and that should stop it. I guarantee it'll break on the next pacman update again though.

It seems Ive installed it through the official repositories:

$ pacman -Qm | grep "discord\|Discord"
// EMPTY OUTPUT

Ill get back to you about the drive checks, either tomorrow evening or the day after. Ive got a technical assessment for a job position tomorrow so I'll have to look into that issue after that. :)

weird. i’d probably good around for drive checks personally, any test should be pretty definitive. how did you install Discord? the AUR? maybe a reinstall is in order.

i don’t think this is Node specific. if i were writing logs, i’d want to be pretty sure they get written, either by creating the directories necessary, putting them in a place i was pretty dang sure existed, and/or crashing as early as possible if the location didn’t exist, which makes me think it’s a weird Discord config error.

Could be drive failure, or maybe your package for discord is broken? I'd try discord flatpak even just as a troubleshooting step, but honestly that's the preferred way to install these kinds of applications anyway

As I mentioned replying to @just_another_person@lemmy.world, my root partition is on an NVME which is not even 3 years old yet, and I have not had any other problems with it apart from discord, so I don't think its a drive failure issue, but better safe rather than sorry, so if you'd be so kind as to let me know how you'd like me to test/verify its health I'd appreciate it :)

Is it possible that the read-only error occurs because the directory its trying to write to doesn't exist (/opt/discord/resources/app.asar/node_modules/electron-log/src/core/ doesnt exist)? It may be a stupid question but as I said I've no idea how node works so consider me as having the intelligence of a rock when it comes to it

$ ls -lh /opt
total 36K
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4.0K Nov 24 15:04 app1
drwx--x--x 4 root root 4.0K Aug 15 16:43 containerd
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Nov 25 17:00 discord
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4.0K Nov 24 15:04 app2
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Feb 25  2025 app3
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4.0K Nov 24 15:04 app4
drwxrwxrwx 6 root root 4.0K Nov 25 17:00 app5
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Mar 20  2025 texlive
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Jun  4 00:59 app6

$ ls -lh /opt/discord
total 216M
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 164K Nov 25 00:11 chrome_100_percent.pak
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 254K Nov 25 00:11 chrome_200_percent.pak
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.5M Nov 25 00:11 chrome_crashpad_handler
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root  15K Nov 25 00:11 chrome-sandbox
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 182M Nov 25 00:11 Discord
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  299 Nov 25 00:11 discord.desktop
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6.9K Nov 25 00:11 discord.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  10M Nov 25 00:11 icudtl.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 247K Nov 25 00:11 libEGL.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.9M Nov 25 00:11 libffmpeg.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6.2M Nov 25 00:11 libGLESv2.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.6M Nov 25 00:11 libvk_swiftshader.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 600K Nov 25 00:11 libvulkan.so.1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Nov 25 17:00 locales
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Nov 25 17:00 resources
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5.8M Nov 25 00:11 resources.pak
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 333K Nov 25 00:11 snapshot_blob.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 702K Nov 25 00:11 v8_context_snapshot.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  107 Nov 25 00:11 vk_swiftshader_icd.json

As for the drive, my root partition is on an NVME drive which should be fine considering its not even 3 years old.

What info does this give you? As someone more experienced, what jumps out at you when looking at this (trying to improve my knowledge while troubleshooting - 2 for the price of 1 xD)

Read only filesystem is the problem, but we need more info to figure out what that means.

Run ls -lh /opt and ls -lh /opt/discord and post the output of both here.

Would also be good to check your drive for SMART errors in case it's on its way out.

error is right here:

EROFS: read-only file system

this line is concerning:

At random times

this sounds like a drive failure. Discord’s logger can’t write to the filesystem; it’s reporting as read-only.

what’s the drive like where /opt lives?

I guess the closest you can come to this is by taking a screenshot of your desktop and setting it as the background of the display manager. Otherwise, Hyprlock seems like your best option.

Each WM offers a list of features. To avoid creating any negative reactions, I wouldn't call the differences as "plus" or" limitations" but rather as developers' choices. KDE can't do it all either ;)

While I left bspwm a few months ago, it served me very well for years. Unfortunately, as far as I remember, I don’t think it can do what you’re describing. That said, setting layout=above in the window’s properties will ensure it stays above others.

You might not be looking to switch to another WM (and maybe not to Wayland), but Niri can actually do what you want, in case you ever feel like experimenting.