Debian_SuperUser
Active Member
So a while ago I had a problem that many programs had a font rendering issue and wouldn't work correctly. I thought I messed up my system and it was pretty bloated and not maintained anyways. For the time being I switched to Plasma 6 from Sway because Plasma was working correctly. I then created another user account because I wanted to use EasyEffects, but didn't fully switch to that account. EasyEffects, and all other programs including Sway worked correctly. So I thought that it was something I messed up with my user account. I was anyways installing some stuff including fonts which I think somehow messed. Still, that really shouldn't have happened no matter what, but I still blamed it on me.
Today I saw this video by Brodie Robertson, and it immediately clicked to me that I could be affected. As said in the video, I cleared by cache, and everything works correctly now. I also updated my system.
TL;DR, Pango started using FC_FONT_WRAPPER in 1.55.0 which was added in fontconfig 2.15. Fontconfig didn't invalidate the cache of the previous version, causing FC_FONT_WRAPPER to break. This affected most GTK 3 and GTK 4 applications. This explains why creating a new user account after the update fixed it on that account because the cache was regenerated.
This is the first time I have witnessed an Arch update not only breaking, but actually severely breaking a system. What has been any of your experiences of an Arch update breaking your system?
Today I saw this video by Brodie Robertson, and it immediately clicked to me that I could be affected. As said in the video, I cleared by cache, and everything works correctly now. I also updated my system.
TL;DR, Pango started using FC_FONT_WRAPPER in 1.55.0 which was added in fontconfig 2.15. Fontconfig didn't invalidate the cache of the previous version, causing FC_FONT_WRAPPER to break. This affected most GTK 3 and GTK 4 applications. This explains why creating a new user account after the update fixed it on that account because the cache was regenerated.
This is the first time I have witnessed an Arch update not only breaking, but actually severely breaking a system. What has been any of your experiences of an Arch update breaking your system?
