Arch Linux

debord

Member

Registered: 2022-09-27

Posts: 1

[SOLVED] Programs completely distorted and broken

Hello. I got up this evening and ran 'yay' to update my system, then I noticed that when I opened my terminal again the fonts were suddenly gone! The terminal text was simply invisible. I tried rebooting my computer, and then discovered that most of my programs turned completely distorted and broken. Chromium has minor distortions when I start it up, and also distorts a bit when I try to move a tab on the task bar, but seems to be generally usable. Discord and Steam, on the other hand, look like this: https://i.imgur.com/WvktTnD.png and https://i.imgur.com/HaWFurO.png. Furthermore, 9.5/10 times when I try to take a screenshot it simply fails and takes a black screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/gr8E1QN.png.

At first I was on Sway with Wayland. I immediately tried installing i3 and xorg-xinit to see if I could fix the problem but it still had the exact same issue. I couldn't get a successful screenshot to take after 20 tries on i3, all black. I then installed plasma and started that up with xinit and I'm still having the same issues on KDE: https://i.imgur.com/ZqywBXd.png. You can also see the invisible terminal text on this one. However, I can see the text in gnome-terminal and it seems to be working fine. This happened suddenly after a reboot with no indication or warning as to what was about to occur. Does anyone have any clue what could be going on here? Does anyone have an idea of a solution that isn't reinstalling the operating system, which I'd prefer not to do right now? I've never seen this in so many years of Linux usage and I'm completely out of clues. Thanks for your time.

EDIT: Some GUI programs simply refuse to load at all, like dolphin: https://i.imgur.com/iW2wAec.png

EDIT: Just solved by reinstalling. Sure hope that doesn't happen again.

Last edited by debord (2022-09-27 04:29:54)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 76,483

Re: [SOLVED] Programs completely distorted and broken

If it does show up again (eg. w/ the next update), this looks like corrupted textures (did you use picom along i3?)
Please then post your xorg log, the output of "glxinfo -B" and a complete system journal "sudo journalctl -b" (in "code" tags,  see https://bbs.archlinux.org/help.php#bbcode )

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linedot

Member

Registered: 2022-09-27

Posts: 1

Re: [SOLVED] Programs completely distorted and broken

Was affected by this as well. It appears version 22.2.0 of mesa + associated packages was the culprit (Which is currently in testing). My GPU is AMD RX 6800XT. Disabled testing repositories for now and downgraded to 22.1.7 - now everything works fine.

There is a bug listed for this already: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/76019?p … tring=mesa

Last edited by linedot (2022-09-27 13:56:38)