Weird Issue with Tailscale and How to Fix it on Arch Linux

On my distro of choice, Arch BTW, I had a weird issue where I couldn’t find a proper solution for. My Tailscale would not let me turn it on and would give me an error where the server and the installed version were mismatched.

After doing some research I found that the backend, the installed version, and the CLI version must have the same versions. I did not find a way to choose a previous version other than the git version which is actually newer than the one you get with tailscale through the AUR. So after thinking about how I would go about fixing this, I remembered I used the AUR program called downgrade that will allow you to downgrade installed programs to an older version. downgrade will even ask if you want to make sure it doesn’t automatically upgrade to a new version when you run a pacman -Syyu by locking it in the /etc/pacman.conf file. I used this program in one of my other posts when rofi decided to break my config when it jumped from version 1.6.x to version 1.7. This can be found here: https://blog.wretchednet.com/post/rofi-broken Similarly, another post about MakeMKV which was broken can also be referenced https://blog.wretchednet.com/post/makemkv-version-requires-downgrade/

sudo downgrade tailscale
(version-you-want-to-use)
[y/N]

Select the version you want to use, pacman will download it and after its done it will prompt you to verify if you want to add it to IgnorePkg.