Can't open pseudoterminals from local following an update on Arch

Question

I did a complete update (via yay->pacman), restarted, and now I seemingly can't open any pseudoterminals. All I can do is switch to TTY/teletype terminals. If I try to open a terminal app, it just does nothing. Any terminal application or any application that runs in a terminal, from any of my installed window managers (Cinnamon, XFCE, Gnome), whether clicking on shortcuts, clicking on executables from the file manager, or running via the run prompt.

I can SSH to myself and interact with the terminal, though. I would've expected this to fail if I truly couldn't create pseudoterminals at the boot/kernel level. So, I'm clueless.

The update was successful, and there appeared to be no problems. I have since updated my mirrors and run another update (two days after my first update), but nothing has changed.

I only found one other post related to this, but it's very old and nothing mentioned appears to be relevant any more: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=123999

I have fully reviewed my systemd journal output, but without knowing what I'm looking for, if there is anything, nothing seemed to stand out. No troublesome problems. No mention of "terminal" or "pts" or "pseudo".

I'm using EndeavorOS (Arch).

Thank you.

Answer 1

It was caused by a broken library (libicuuc) that another member of the community noticed from my systemd journal:

May 22 15:27:53 dustinxps /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[3980]: /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal: error while loading shared libraries: libicuuc.so.70: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I then used lddtree (pax-utils) to identify that vte3 was what was directly depending on it, which all of my terminals have in common. This jogged my memory that I had been prompted a couple of times regarding vte3 when I had upgraded and then confirmed the upgrade, but then it had stopped coming up. It then occurred to me that I had the transparency-patched version of gnome-terminal installed, and this likely caused vte3 to be built from source and depending on the old libicuuc. So, I needed to fully remove that version of gnome-terminal and vte3-git and all of its dependencies (maybe thirty packages, many of which seemed unnecessary). So, I did that, installed the pure vte3 binary package, reinstalled the dependencies, and reinstalled xfce4-terminal and gnome-terminal, and they now worked.

Good grief.