I would hope that you are right, as this is the intended way and as it should be, I understand (and have taken care of other pacnew files in the past). However, I cannot find the pacnew line related to mkinitcpio in my pacman log (as someone suggested otherwhere in this thread) and all I ever use is pamac (some rare times pacman). I cannot talk for others who seem to face the same “problem” of a miraculously changed mkinitcpio.conf.
So
Adding to this: Say the mkinitcpio misconfiguration is to be blamed on me as user, still, I wonder why the update procedure mkinitcpio-updated (and thus rendered non-bootable due to the misconfiguration) all the initramfs’es – otherwise at least I could have selected one of the fallback entries in GRUB to boot an old kernel/initramfs and repair the system.
I always update Manjaro with pacman so maybe pamac did something wrong on your side. I think most people on Testing branch also use pacman to update so it may be possible that pamac overwrote your config file, not sure if it is technically possible but seems plausible.
Need all the ones with same issue to maybe confirm that they also used Pamac and not pacman (sorry too lazy to read all messages, if you remember or can find the others you’re talking about, reply by calling their @name so they receive a notification).
You’re best bet would be to try and see if you can find a flatpak or appimage (snap won’t work because of the forced update mechanism in snap) of the version you need (that way it will contain all the required libraries it requires). Running on a rolling release version of linux is not conducive to keep old outdated software working.
Only hitch I had is with audio control: the volume icon and volume keys no longer control the system volume. Dunst notifications appear as they should when I try to change the volume, but the volume itself does not change.
I can control volume from within the AlsaMixer, as expected.
On a lesser extent I’m also wondering if /etc/default/grub could be merged :
diff /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.pacnew
3,5c3,5
< GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu
< GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR='Manjaro'
< GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet resume=UUID=9b5e4530-6b1c-46c6-a66c-984c6986ebe0"
---
> GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden
> GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="Manjaro"
> GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet udev.log_priority=3"
32,33c32,33
< # Uncomment if you want GRUB to pass to the Linux kernel the old parameter
< # format "root=/dev/xxx" instead of "root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/xxx"
---
> # Uncomment if you want GRUB to pass to the Linux kernel the old parameter
> # format "root=/dev/xxx" instead of "root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/xxx"
39c39
< # Uncomment and set to the desired menu colors. Used by normal and wallpaper
---
> # Uncomment and set to the desired menu colors. Used by normal and wallpaper
46c46
< GRUB_THEME="/usr/share/grub/themes/manjaro/theme.txt"
---
> #GRUB_THEME="/path/to/gfxtheme"
If I want the manjaro grub menu to appear on each boot I have to keep GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu right ?
Concerning the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT lin, I don’t know what to do…
In the end I just changed the characters and left my modules as is.
//edit: and for your GRUB you can keep it as you have it currently, then changes are only comments, the new Manjaro grub theme, and quotes, or not, around parameters. You don’t want to replace your GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line, it contains the needed info to resume from sleep, you could add the missing parameter though if you want.
//edit: everytime there is a pacnew doesn’t mean it is REQUIRED to overwrite your file. Here the changes are marginal and would not break anything if not applied. pacnew file just mean there was changes in the default config file, and it is up to you to think if and what you will modify, or not.
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.