Ideally, you should use Pamac (if you’re doing CLI), not Pacman, to update Manjaro. Haven’t used Manjaro in a while, but this is gospel most of the time.
Seriously. I used Manjaro for a short period about 5 or 6 years ago but ran into so many issues with it. Vanilla Arch on the other hand is very forgiving in my experience. I have a second desktop PC with Arch installed and I only update that machine once every couple of months when I actually need to use it. In my four years of doing that I never had an update break my system.
I’ve used and come back to Arch for nearly 8 years now and Manjaro has always been a broken distribution and genuinely gives Arch a bad rep.
Arch has always been a very stable daily driver for me, never breaking and never having issues with it. I’m always confused on what people are doing when they have issues with their entire distro breaking, especially since you pick all your packages and such anyways.
I’ve had a few breaking changes in 10 years of dailying Arch across multiple devices.
Most egregiously one time a PAM update included a new PAM config… which got applied as .pacnew, but the new PAM config was critical and I could not login with a cryptic error message.
That probably took me a solid hour to figure out, because config file conflicts is probably pacman’s weakest point. At least apt starts conflict resolution by default.
I don’t think in this specific case it does, though. I had similar problems with a completely different distribution. I’m convinced that it’s an upstream Qt or KDE issue where broken caches or changed cache formats don’t get automatically invalidated and rebuild. In the case I vividly remember some lower level graphics library was updated and everything seemed to run fine but for some (and only some) users it resulted in Qt or some KDE component not being able to parse the cache any longer. After some research (under Gnome) I wrote a small script that quit Plasma and KWin, deleted all the caches (icon, font, …) and then launched KWin and Plasma again. Worked fine and came handy on a couple of further occasions.
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