Unable to start gnome applications because of shared library libappstream
Whenever I am trying to start a gnome applications (like calculator, Files, event gnome-control-center), I get the following error:
gnome-control-center: error while loading shared libraries: libappstream.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
After further research, It appeared that I don’t have libappstream.so.4 in /usr/lib/, yet I do not find online any way to install this specific version of appstream on arch.
Distribution: Garuda Linux 2.6.19-2
gnome-firmware version: 45.0-1
I got the same error one week ago or something and for me this was because appstream had been updated to version 1.0.0-5 which was not compatible with gnome-software. My solution was to downgrade appstream the previous version (0.16.4-1). If you have it in your pacman cache the following command should do it:
sudo pacman -U file:///var/cache/pacman/pkg/appstream-0.16.4-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
If you don’t have it in you cache you should be able to download it from here instead https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/a/appstream/appstream-0.16.4-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst and install.
You can then add appstream to IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf to prevent it from being upgraded in the future if downgrading it fixed your issue, e.g.:
IgnorePkg = appstream
Read more about downgrading here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/downgrading_packages