Manjaro updates on the New System

January 8, 2026

Well, I’d really like to say the first update went well and for the most part I can say that BUT a couple of things came up. I had to rebuild qt5-doc with pamac. This was both painful and long. It took on the order of 30 min to complete and threw many errors (which I was convinced would break the build but didn’t).

The other issue is Chromium is hooped… ungoogled chromium also broken. Weird symptoms are the browser launches with tabs appearing to try and open and then nothing is drawn, there’s no clicking on anything and getting a reaction except, the close window button and the menu button. But the menu comes up gray and mostly transparent which isn’t too helpful… exit works but none of the other options appear to work.

Looking in journalctrl there are a bunch of issues including problems for nouveau (This is the graphics driver). It turns out it was an NVIDIA driver issue. I had to install proprietary nvidia drivers as the native Manjaro driver behaves badly with my GTX 970 card. This article was very helpful getting that done. All worked after that.

Now there’s a new update and again the system is breaking (boots but to a blank screen, no terminal, no nothing, I can force a reboot from the keyboard but that’s about it). Very frustrating. This is the third strike (initial setup fights are included here), updates shouldn’t be a whack-a-mole experience to keep the system stable and working. I’ll try out EndeavourOS and Kubuntu and maybe KDE Neon.

Update: May 8, 2026

I’ve moved over to Kubuntu. EndeavourOS was too gritty and I lost patience trying to get it working with my hardware. Kubuntu worked out of the box but not really well. I figured out that a lot of my problems above were likely related to the video driver problem that is an issue for any version of linux. Proprietary drivers are the only ones that give the fully useful experience. It feels like the video card is “ancient” and in computer life cycle terms I suppose that’s true but there’s nothing wrong with it, so I’m glad it’s still supported but it is unfortunate that it’s “too old” to be included by default in current linux distributions.

I also had an older TP-link wifi USB adapter that is also simply too old. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the hardware but it was too much hassle to keep rolling and it’s simply too cheap to replace with a more modern piece of hardware to make it worth fighting to get the older wifi adapter working.