Today I updated my Manjaro system (stable). Shortly after, I discovered that a lot of places now use weird fonts (e. g., the terminal uses Verdana, a non-monospace font, and the Swaybar also looks interesting).
Taking a look at the pacman.log, there were 2 packages which seemed to be the culprit: ttf-jetbrains-mono-nerd and ttf-roboto-mono-nerd (though these are just the packages I’ve installed). Having a look at their changelog, version 3.1.0 (now found in Manjaro stable) accidentally introduced a breaking bug, which causes these problems. Version 3.1.1 (which is already in Manjaro unstable) did a rollback.
The problem is (in my opinion at least), that quite a few people will encounter this problem, and then they will try to “fix” their configs to conform to the bad font names, which will be rolled back with the next version.
So basically, it would make sense to update to the new versions as soon as possible (without having to switch to Manjaro unstable, of course). I’m not sure how unstable packages are deemed to be fit for Manjaro stable, though. It’s not really a bug either, so I’m not sure whether a bug report would be appropriate. Unless I’m wrong in wanting these packages to be prioritized, could somebody point me in the right direction?
These packages are inherited from Arch so a user could either download and install latest packages from Arch repositories and install updated version locally, or get packages from source and install locally:
Yes, I’m aware there are possibilities to work around the package management, and installing fonts manually is always an option. I was just wondering whether it wouldn’t make more sense to actually distribute the fixed packages, considering they’re already there. Not sure how many users see these fonts by default, but Manjaro Sway users will have to deal with this problem until version 3.1.1 hits stable or they will have to change their config multiple times.
Oh well, in any case this thread may help other users to pin down the problem.
A workaround would be to use tools that don’t rely on fancy fonts for aesthetics or have fallback font options
It would make more sense for Manjaro team to fix the issue for affected users by releasing updated packages. But some users may not want to wait, so they have the option to fix it for themselves
Replacing a couple of fonts is not a complicated process. Most users could probably fix the problem faster than posting a complaint about Manjaro maintainers
Fonts located in ~/.local/share/fonts/ can be deleted when updated fonts are available from /usr/share/fonts/
Just for clarification, I definitely did not want to complain about the Manjaro maintainers. Sorry if I gave that impression. They are doing an excellent job with this distribution.
I simply pointed out this problem because a) there were no forum entries yet, b) I wanted to save other users from potentially ruining their application configs (as changing these was actually recommended in some early nerd fonts bug reports) and c) I thought the problem might not be known yet in Manjaro land and might be easily fixed for everybody by pushing the new versions.
If manually upgrading the packages or manually installing the fonts are the ways to go for now, that is of course also entirely understandable and answers my initial question. Though I find it hard to believe “most users” could fix the problem that fast, as even pinpointing the problem took me quite a while.
Comment about users complaining was to deter other users from trying to amplify this as a team issue
I don’t see that this has been reported before, but If it had, another report would not be a problem
IMO the optimal solution would be for working packages to be released to stable branch
that is probably a decision for @Yochanan
I do not have the means to get packages released, but I can help users to deal with this issue for themselves if they want it resolved quickly