[Stable Update] 2024-07-16 – Kernels, Firefox, Thunderbird, Nvidia, Systemd, LibreOffice – Stable Updates

2024-07-01 – Robin Candau

After upgrading to openssh-9.8p1, the existing SSH daemon will be unable to accept new connections (see Can’t login after openssh 9.8p1-1 upgrade, MUST restart sshd (#5) · Issues · Arch Linux / Packaging / Packages / openssh · GitLab).
When upgrading remote hosts, please make sure to restart the sshd service using systemctl try-restart sshd right after upgrading.

We are evaluating the possibility to automatically apply a restart of the sshd service on upgrade in a future release of the openssh-9.8p1 package.

– Arch Linux – News: The sshd service needs to be restarted after upgrading to openssh-9.8p1

This is a known bug. “Workaround” is to change the firewall with firewalld or to disable UFW.
Another easier workaround is to edit /etc/libvirt/network.conf, and add

firewall_backend = "iptables"

If you have a lot of pip/AUR packages to upgrade to Python 3.12, read this.

If you installed python312 from the AUR, you need to uninstall it before running this update.

Due to a bug MacOS is not bootable with 9.0: [9.0.0] qemu breaks mac os vm (#2334) · Issues · QEMU / QEMU · GitLab
Workaround: remove virtio-serial and org.qemu.guest_agent.0 from libvirt XML until bug will be fixed.

Helper script to reset plasma Manjaro-Plasma-Reset/manjaro-plasma-reset.sh at main – wonky/Manjaro-Plasma-Reset – Codeberg.org @liinux-aarhus
Also I would, before the update:

• make a Timeshift snapshot if you ain’t got no recent one.
• ( export content of widgets like your radio stations in Advanced Radio Player or your Podcasts in Kasts or any podcatcher as a backup )
• make a fresh boot, but before that even:
• System Settings > Appearance > Global Theme > set to Breath and tick both options for defaults
• You might go to the hamburger menu in System Settings and look what changes you made away from default by selecting: Highlight Changed Settings and see if you want to make the effort to get back more defaults
• System Settings > Workspace > Startup and Shutdown: SDDM defaults and Desktop Session: Start with empty session
• disable all user-installed widgets that are still on your desktop, panels and even lock screen or wallpaper (e.g. Active Blur)
• Export your custom shortcuts or mouse gestures in SS> Workspace > Shortcuts
• Reboot, Timeshift snapshot, reboot
• then do not log in, do the update via tty (CTRL+ALT+F3, same with F2 gets you back)
• reboot, login, check through System Settings
• reboot again
• enjoy 8)

post-install:

• look for Plasma 6 replacements for your widgets after the install
• in case you have Github-installed theming: uninstall the KDE5-version of klassy, install the Plasma 6 version of klassy, maybe reinstall lightly

(greetings, @1efaf7d71a8637c6800a , PS: these are just my thoughts; I didn’t do this update yet!)

Open /usr/lib/kde_ufw_plugin_helper.py and change the first line from #!/usr/bin/python3.11 to #!/usr/bin/python3.12. This fixed the issue for me immediately and makes sense since Manjaro is currently on Python 3.12.

Qt 6 is now default but some apps are still using Qt 5
To restore the look of QT apps after this update

pamac install kvantum-qt5

Manjaro-settings-manager has light theme instead of dark

DKMS fails for v4l2loopback on 6.8 kernel (#2) · Issues · Arch Linux / Packaging / Packages / v4l2loopback · GitLab

The kernel changed default ntfs driver from FUSE one to ntfs3.
These two are not fully compatible, mainly as far as mount options go. If you have custom mount options in the fstab (or any other application, such as VeraCrypt) they need to be changed.

Symptoms:
Mount fails with: Device or resource busy
DMesg reports: Can't open blockdev

Solution:
Migrate your mount options. For me the changes were:

• allow_other → umask=000
• default_permissions → [drop]
• user_id=1000 → uid=1000
• group_id=1000 → gid=1000

ssh component is not included (#3) · Issues · Arch Linux / Packaging / Packages / gnome-keyring · GitLab

With a newer version of plymouth than 22.02.122 you may experience an unbootable system with a black screen. This might be due to not having early KMS enabled. If you have an Nvidia GPU you could set nvidia_drm.modeset=1 nvidia_drm.fbdev=1 to the kernel parameters in your bootloader config to avoid the need of KMS. However, with Wayland around the corner, KMS will be needed.

To “fix” the current problem, we have downgraded plymouth once again to have more time to find a proper solution to migrate most of your installations to a working state with newer plymouth versions.

sudo pacman -Syuu

Those who don’t have issues can enjoy the newer version of plymouth.

Directions for adding kms to your system configuration and how you can help troubleshooting by providing some sysinfo, read more → Black Screen with Plymouth – Cause and Solution

With polkit 124-1 there were changes made to etc/pam.d/polkit-1. So check if you made local changes to the file. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/19bnj0i/comment/kit2v33/

• Yes, replace bashrc-manjaro with bash
• Please also compare your:
  /etc/bash.bashrc
  with the generated
  /etc/bash.bashrc.pacsave
  and retrofit all of your customisations as there was no .pacnew file generated.
• Same goes for /etc/skel/.bashrc

pacman-contrib is now split out from pacman. If you have anything installed that depends on pacman-contrib, update (after you finished the Release Update) with:

sudo pacman -Syu pacman-contrib

We all known that kernel 6.7 is very feature rich. One of the features is the inclusion of Nvidia’s GSP Boot firmware into Initramfs. However this will increase your image by 150 MB and the fallback image might be 240 MB in size. A way would be to remove kms from mkinitcpio.conf and redo your initramfs images. A discussion regarding that can be found at Arch Gitlab: kms hook increases the initramfs size heavily starting with 6.7 kernel (#238) · Issues · Arch Linux / Mkinitcpio / mkinitcpio · GitLab

To reduce size add fallback_options="-S autodetect -S kms" to /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux67.preset

2024-01-09 – Jan Alexander Steffens

We are making dbus-broker our default implementation of D-Bus, for improved performance, reliability and integration with systemd.

For the foreseeable future we will still support the use of dbus-daemon, the previous implementation. Pacman will ask you whether to install dbus-broker-units or dbus-daemon-units. We recommend picking the default.

For a more detailed rationale, please see our RFC 25.

– Arch Linux – News: Making dbus-broker our default D-Bus daemon

In some cases, however it is better to keep the legacy way. Here are some examples: Dbus-broker warnings