I broke my Arch System
I updated my system, and now I only see a black screen
Today, I updated my system running Arch Linux after a month using pacman -Syu. I rebooted my system to find a black screen instead of the SDDM login screen. I tried pressing the Caps Lock key, and I could see its light toggle. This meant that things were not that bad.
I changed the tty using Ctrl + Alt + F2 and logged in to my system. I tried downgrading the Linux kernel but that didn’t help. I tried disabling the optimus-manager and sddm services, and tried starting the Xorg server using startx or xinit. None of this worked.
The fix was to rebuild the optimus-manager package. It turns out that Python was upgraded from 3.9 to 3.10 in the update, and this broke Optimus Manager. I rebuilt it, and I am able to access the login screen and my window manager again.
I could see that some of my AUR packages were still built using older versions of Python using this command:
pacman -Qoq /usr/lib/python3.9
I rebuilt all those packages to use the latest Python version.
I also finally installed yay to manage all my AUR packages.