[Stable Update] 2025-07-12 - Kernels, Systemd, GNOME, NVIDIA, Plasma, Firefox, VLC splits

Known issues and solutions

This is a wiki post; please edit as necessary.
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Please RTFT (Read This Fine Thread) first before reporting the same issues over and over again!

Note: Do not forget to review your .pacnew files:

:arrow_right: 2025-07-12

Warning: ksystemstats: local (6.4.0-1) is newer than extra

If you get this warning, run the following command… :point_down:

sudo pacman -Syuu
VLC does not play (certain) videos

For this update, the VLC packages were split up, and not all codecs may be installed on your system. You can install the additional codecs individually, or install the vlc-plugins-all meta-package, which will pull in all available plugins.

 sudo pacman -S vlc-plugins-all
linux-firmware-meta replaces linux-fimware

With the linux-firmware-meta package, all of the firmware is now split up into individual packages, which are all installed as dependencies of linux-firmware-meta.

If you wish to uninstall the firmware packages that you don’t need — e.g. linux-firmware-nvidia — including the meta package itself, then be sure to mark the firmware packages you wish to keep as explicitly installed, or else pacman will regard them as orphans, which would be dangerous when cleaning out your real orphans.

2025-06-23

Breaking changes to wine and wine-staging

Transition to the new WoW64 wine and wine-staging

2025-06-16

We are transitioning the wine and wine-staging package to a pure wow64 build. This change removes the dependency on the multilib repository for wine and wine-staging.

The main reason for this is to align with upstream Wine development, which simplifies packaging and the dependency chain.

Potential Issues:

  • OpenGL Performance: A known limitation of the new WoW64 mode is reduced performance for 32-bit applications that use OpenGL directly
  • Breaking Changes: Existing 32-bit prefixes needs to be recreated

If you are facing issues with 32 bit prefixes, please recreate these and reinstall the application.

Possible breaking changes to pacman-mirrors

:warning: With pacman-mirrors 5.0-1, the global mirrors.json data file has been moved from /usr/share/pacman-mirrors to /var/lib/pacman-mirrors.
:warning: This move introduces a possible breaking change if you have custom scripts relying on the mirrors data file. If this is the case, then simply create a symlink from the new location under /var/lib back to the old location, i.e. /usr/share.

ln -s /var/lib/pacman-mirrors /usr/share/

:information_source: The moving of the file is the only change and has been made to make it possible for users to have their /usr-tree on a separate read-only partition or btrfs subvolume.

xkeyboard-config 2.45 issue with symlinks

You may fail to upgrade from 2.44 to 2.45 due to some changes to symlinks. A discussion about it can be found here: Cannot update xkeyboard-config to 2.45 / Pacman & Package Upgrade Issues / Arch Linux Forums

The solution is to update the AUR packages depending on xkeyboard-config or move the files to the new folder /usr/share/xkeyboard-config-2.

More information about it here: xkeyboard-config 2.45 issue with symlinks (#1) · Issues · Arch Linux / Packaging / Packages / xkeyboard-config · GitLab

avahi-discover python script may fail to discover services

avahi-discover fails when attempting to write the discovered services to a sqlite database in /usr/lib/avahi due to lack of permissions.

The issue can be reproduced using a pristine Arch LInux system - it appears from the issues at GitHub - avahi/avahi: Avahi - Service Discovery for Linux using mDNS/DNS-SD -- compatible with Bonjour the issue is known - but not fixed.

Use of dbm causes problems with Python 3.13 · Issue #670 · avahi/avahi · GitHub
Fix issue with dbm.sqlite3 on readonly directories by mickael9 · Pull Request #698 · avahi/avahi · GitHub

Even though the issue has been known to upstream since december 2024, the behaviour on unstable branch has changed fairly recently - perhaps 4 weeks.

Temporary workaround
The workaround it is not optimal - but if you rely on avahi discover service - it will work

Move /usr/lib/avahi to /var/lib and symlink it back to /usr

sudo mv /usr/lib/avahi /var/lib/ && sudo ln -s /var/lib/avahi /usr/lib/

Change the ownership of the folder /var/lib/avahi including files

sudo chown root:avahi /var/lib/avahi -R

Change permissions to allow avahi group to write into the folder including the existing db file

sudo chmod g+w /var/lib/avahi -R

Finally add yourself to the avahi group

sudo gpasswd -a $USER avahi

Logoff and login to activate the new group.

Topic in German section
Avahi zeroconf browser zeigt nichts an

2025-04-12

Grub gained security fixes. Updating it may be risky

When Manjaro updates the grub package the actual installed binaries in master boot record (MBR) or UEFI won’t get updated. This is however needed to apply recent security fixes added to grub. Therefore we created Install-grub: a new way to keep your EFI/MBR in-sync with grub package to make it easier.

A more manual approach can be found here: [root tip] [How To] Primer on handling a grub package update

We also have it documented in our wiki on how to manually install grub when a disaster happens: GRUB/Restore the GRUB Bootloader - Manjaro. So if you are not experienced with it you can either ignore that extra step or have an install media at hand to recover as needed.

See also on how to create a boot media to install Manjaro fresh: Burn an ISO File - Manjaro. Those who want to get install medias having this update included may look for 25.0 ISOs when released or here: Releases · manjaro/release-review · GitHub

Remember, update-grub only updates the boot menu and install-grub is a script helper to install or reinstall grub on most case automatically via grub-install. All grub installations can be with a risk when not done properly as the user will change low level system parts and can easily break their systems.

Note: most likely grub was initially installed by an installer and therefore the user doesn’t know how grub got installed. So if you are unsure simply skip a reinstallation of grub.

2025-03-24

System may hang during splash screen when Nvidia 570 drivers are used

A lot of users with older Nvidia cards report system hanging on Plymouth splash screen after installing Nvidia 570 drivers. In the past we had issues with plymouth in general combined with Nvidia drivers. Therefore we didn’t update plymouth in our stable and testing branch.

As a workaround splash could be removed from /etc/default/grub file followed by a update-grub cmd to remove plymouth from starting. Another alternative is to test the newer plymouth and give feedback if that solves the issue:

sudo pacman -U https://mirrors.manjaro.org/repo/pool/overlay/plymouth-24.004.60-12-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

No sound from PulseAudio after PipeWire update

If PulseAudio audio playback is suspended after PipeWire update, unload module-suspend-on-idle

pactl unload-module module-suspend-on-idle

If that works, create a custom default.pa configuration for PulseAudio in home folder

cp /etc/pulse/default.pa ~/.config/pulse/default.pa

and comment out module-suspend-on-idle in custom configuration

sed -i '/load-module module-suspend-on-idle/s/^/#/' ~/.config/pulse/default.pa

2025-03-05

[community] repository removed from servers

Similar to Arch we removed our [community] repos from our mirrors and servers. You may want to check your pacnew files or manually remove [community] and [kde-unstable] when used in your /etc/pacman.conf file.

2025-05-02
community has been re-created as an empty repository so that systems where package manager configuration /etc/pacman.conf has not been updated can still be used to update packages from other repositories

2025-02-16

Update only regular repository packages first, no AUR

Follow the best practice of first updating only regular repository packages, followed separately by AUR packages.

  1. Update regular repository packages first with
    • pamac update --no-aur
      or
    • sudo pacman -Syu
  2. Then, if needed, update AUR packages.

Failure to follow this practice may result in the installation of packages that you may not need, and may cause problems. For further details, see:

Keyboard layout issues / Update issues with fcitx5

If a system had sdl2 installed and AUR updates enabled, fcitx5 might be installed as a make dependency

It is recommended to remove fcitx5 and any other orphan packages following the update

pamac remove --orphans

Update issues with fcitx5

2025-02-04

Kernel 4,19 and 6.11 are EOL, 6.11 and 4.19 got removed from repos

Kernel 6.11 and 4.19 got marked [EOL] on kernel.org
Linux 6.11 and 4.19 have been removed from the repositories.
Please ensure your system use a supported kernel mhwd-kernel -l

PostgreSQL users should consider to prepare the change of major version 16→17

More info here and here

Update libpamac before installing the 2025-02-04 updates

Run sudo pacman -Sy libpamac in a terminal to make sure pamac-manager doesn’t crash during the update.

XFCE 4.20 may blank display after 5 mins idle time regardless of power management settings

Most likely this: Disable screen blanking

Call xfce4-screensaver-preferences and disable the screensaver.
xfce4-screensaver - Usage [Xfce Docs]

Previous stable update threads: