The safest bet is to just modify your current configuration changing the “” to (). That will keep your system running the way it was before. The .pacnew is a BASE configuration making the new change for arrays from “” to ().
(edit: just the arrays get changed from “” to (), so HOOKS, MODULES, BINARIES, FILES, and COMPRESSION_OPTIONS, the single strings like COMPRESSION remains a “”, )
As for the grub changes I personally just left my original in place because that is how I wanted my grub to be, from what I could tell most of the grub changes had to do with adding periods to the end of several commented out lines.
Same happened for me, actually during installation of web-installer-url-handler (1.0.2-1) running Linux 5.8.18-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Nov 1 14:10:04 UTC 2020 x86_64 GNU/Linux, i3wm.
THX your solution helped me. After the update there was just the blank screen.
ALT+F3 lead me to TTY, where I could perform your suggestion:
mhwd -r pci video-nvidia-455xx (remove of the nvidia driver)
mhwd -i pci video-nvidia-455xx (install of the nvidia driver)
For me, it seems, that the issue was Kernel 5.9 and the (incompatible) Nvidia driver for kernel 5.8 (my previous kernel)
After remove and install the Nvidia driver, the driver for the 5.9 kernel was installed and plasma (graphical interface) popped up instantly without reboot.
You have no choice so either you ‘downgrade’ to a kernel which has what you want, or you go the custom route by installing things from the AUR… which is not worth it, do the logic thing, use a current kernel which has your driver, example NOT the latest kernel 5.9
But then I decided to add to already existing kernel 5.4 and 5.8 also kernel 5.9 and 5.10rc and upon reboot, my nice manjaro themed grub menu was gone and was greeted by some horrifying black text only grub menu? (top text does say : GNU GRUB version 2.04~manjaro)
How to get the nice graphical Manjaro grub menu back?
(btw. both 5.9 and 5.10 do seem to work just fine also so far.)
I had this line before. The last grub.pacnew from this very update removed this theme line, so I just in case commented it out instead of removing. Then again it seemed to work nicely without the line, just before I did add the new kernels after the update and few reboots. I guess I have to uncomment it again then.
edit:
Ah ofc. Now I see. The update updated system and kernels and everything, updated-grub (with my old /etc/default/grub), added new grub.pacnew. Then I ran pacdiff, and commented the removed line out of /etc/default/grub according to pacnew; however forgot to run update-grub (that’s why it seemed to work perfectly before new kernels); then less than hour later decided to add newer kernels and then the update-grub happened without the theme line. Brilliant.