Hello everyone, I’ve had an issue with discord on Arch Linux for a long time, but only now had the time to document the error (had to photograph it with phone and transcribe it).
Its a weird one, buckle up.
At random times, discord crashes which causes my polybar to crash, as well as my sxhkd, which obviously means my computer is practically useless until I hard shutdown using the power button on my case. Whats weird is that sometimes it will go weeks without crashing, and other times it will crash frequently in a short time span (e.g. it crashed a couple times yesterday, and once today).
Here is the error as I photographed it:
And here it is after I manually copied it into a text editor (keep in mind I might have missed a character here or there because of this).
A JavaScript Error occurred in the main process
Uncaught exception:
Error: EROFS: read-only file system, write
at writeSync (node:fs:923:3)
at SyncWriteStream._write (node:internal/fs/sync._write_stream:275)
at writeOrBuffer (node:internal/streams/writable:572:12)
at _write (node:internal/streams/writable:501:10)
at Writeable.write (node:internal/streams/writable:510:10)
at console.value (node:internal/console/constructor:298:16)
at console.warn (node:internal/console/constructor:405:26)
at transport.writeFn (/opt/discord/resources/app.asar/node_modules/electron-log/src/node/transports/console.js:45:7)
at transport (/opt/discord/resources/app.asar/node_modules/electron-log/src/node/transports/console.js:51:15)
at Logger.processMessage (/opt/discord/resources/app.asar/node_modules/electron-log/src/core/Logger.js:175:11)
Anyone have any idea how I can troubleshoot this?
I also tried checking the following directory but it doesn’t exist on my PC:
/opt/discord/resources/app.asar/node_modules/electron-log/src/core/
I only have the file /opt/discord/resources/app.asar So obviously something is going on there that shouldn’t be happening.
I’ve got no idea how to troubleshoot node apps, so would appreciate any help from those of you who have those skills.
Thanks in advance! Please let me know if you need more info or need me to run commands and show you the output, and Ill do so.
This sounds to me like something else is killing all your shit and it causes discord to crash first.
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?
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
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: PASSEDAlso 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 : 0As 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.
Read only filesystem is the problem, but we need more info to figure out what that means.
Run
ls -lh /optandls -lh /opt/discordand 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.
$ 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.jsonAs 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)
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/discordand that should stop it. I guarantee it’ll break on the next pacman update again though.
