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.