Unable to open GNOME settings on Arch Linux after GNOME upgrade

Often times I blog about topics because I want to make sure I have a record of an issue and how I resolved it. This is one of those times.

As discussed last week, I recently made the switch from Debian to Arch Linux. The biggest draw for me was to get the latest GNOME (GNOME 3.28 at the time of this writing), which I upgraded to and then ran into issues.

Specifically, any GNOME settings I tried to run would either crash without showing anything or would show up for a brief moment and then lock up hard.

Upon further investigation, and by investigation I mean running the GNOME settings app from the command-line with the verbose argument:

gnome-control-center -v

This revealed some timeout error while registering the app:

Failed to register: Timeout was reached

Not entirely sure what that means, so I figured maybe it had something to do with the fact that I had removed some of the apps that came installed with the gnome meta package. Shit like evolution, empathy and epiphany which I don’t use and figured I didn’t need.

Reinstalling the gnome package in it’s entirety was no help.

If reinstalling didn’t help, maybe removing the package entirely and installing it fresh would be the solution.

Only problem is that I’m still somewhat of a noob to Arch and I wasn’t sure what the Arch equivalent of apt remove --purge was.

Fortunately Arch has killer docs and I settled on pacman -Rndd gnome-control-center.

• -R to remove the package
• -n to purge the configuration files
• -dd so it would remove itself but not the things that depended on it (i.e. the rest of the gnome apps I had installed)

So I did that, then followed up by reinstalling the package with pacman -S gnome-control-center.

Rebooted and everything was back in business!