LightDM breaks when I install new Mesa drivers

Hi all,

I made a previous post asking how to install Mesa 20.2.0 drivers. I figured out how to do that and my machine actually runs great with the 20.2.0-2 packages. However, when I install any newer drivers than that (currently the newest being 20.2.1-2 that I can find on the archlinux repo), I lose the ability to get to my desktop with a simple “LightDM failed to start” error. Opening a tty session and reinstalling my 20.2.0-2 packages gives me my desktop back but I would like to figure out how to troubleshoot lightdm to give me access to the latest Mesa drivers. Appreciate any help, thank you.

Where are you installing Mesa 20.2.0 from?

from memory, when pamac removes mesa, it’s goes “ill also remove everything that depends on mesa” including your window manager, lightdm? all sorts of essential stuff, completley blasts the system

Yay package manager is smart enough not to remove all things that depend on mesa.

I had a warning/ guide for this on the old forum ill try resurrect it

Just to be clear …
If you are manually installing things from a third party, especially if those versions dont align with your other packages from the repos …
This is considered a ‘partial upgrade’ and thus unsupported. Breakage is expected.

I downloaded the packages from the archlinux staging repo.

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/staging/x86_64/mesa/

I also tried yay -U *.pkg in a folder I had all of my latest mesa drivers in and it broke lightdm the same way.

can you use the one from the AUR?

yay -S mesa-git lib32-mesa-git