After yesterday’s update, my desktop background is barely recognizable. The desktop wallpaper has broken up into vertical lines. In Brave, no characters were visible at all. I’ve managed to get the problem in Brave under control for now by launching Brave this way:
brave --disable-gpu
After that, Brave was readable again, so I turned off hardware acceleration. The rest (Desktop) looks terrible. What can I do?
Just downgrading mesa is a bad idea, you end up in a partial syc’d package situation as many packages depend on mesa and mesa depends on many others. If you have no timeshift backup you could use to revert to an older stage, better wait for the fix, if it’s really mesa linked.
Since this is about the 5-6-7 user with pre 2011 intel gpu, and there is an official bug report in the mesa github i think we are pretty sure at this point
I have written a recommendation to wait with the update in the “known problems” but for those who didn’t wait…of course restoring a backup will be better. Compromise, whit all the negatives as you correctly pointed out - downgrading mesa.
The ultimate solution would be to fast track the new version as soon as ready for all branches, but last time i checked several days ago upstream still hadn’t released a fixed version. Gotta check again.
Alternative command: manjaro-downgrade mesa
And you select the previous newest version. Might need to install manjaro-downgrade first.
Please note that the point of partial downgrade is valid - if you have a snapshot of the entire root pre-update it will be better to use that.
This is a well-known issue with older Intel graphics and mesa.
@Teo 's workaround works and worked well for me for over a month, despite @Wollie 's concerns. And yes, manjaro-downgrade offers the option to add mesa to the ignore list for future updates. However, I suggest you avoid doing so. Why?
On 2026-06-03 a new version of mesa which fixes the problem entered Arch Extra-Testing. On 2026-06-04 (earlier today) it was moved out of testing into Arch Extra. Manjaro will pick up the update in due course.
Then lets ping @philm to fast track the new fixed mesa to all branches, so that people with pre 2011 intel gpus can use their computers withouth the need to downgrade or restore snapshots.
Speaking only as an ordinary user, it showed up on my Unstable Branch machine the other day. Not yet on my Testing Branch one, as of noontime US Eastern 2026-06-06.
In the meanwhile, sudo manjaro-downgrade mesa works. If you choose “no” when asked if you want to add it to your Ignore List, when the update comes, you’ll get updated.
Pinging @philm@Yochanan to fasttrack the new mesa to all branches so that people having pre-2011 Intels can use manjaro stable again in a supported way.
In case that takes unreasonable amount of time, just as downgrading, alternate solution will be to manually install those packages from unstable branch. Again, that will put you in unsupported state. Also keep in mind some other packages are closely connected to the mesa version, like vulkan.
Is Mesa amber really generally recommended instead of waiting for the Mesa update? Aren’t there any (future?) conflicts or issues with GDM or other components?
