The update manager in Linux Mint updated libllvm15 and now Brave is completely unusable for me. Is it possible to fix this without using a system backup?

vortexal@sopuli.xyz to Linux@lemmy.ml – 29 points –

Brave is my primary web browser but every page I visit isn't being rendered correctly at all and some pages are completely broken. I have a system backup from a few days ago but I'd prefer not to have to use it if I can. I think Brave is the only thing that was affected but I think I should try to revert the update if it's possible.

31

Simple fix: Install firefox and never use a chromium based browser again. :-P

I already have Firefox installed. I use both because some websites work better on Brave while some work better on Firefox.

Using Chromium de-googled there's no harm done. Chrome's engine is much faster than Firefox's I'm afraid. It's much easier seen on older hardware, where you can actually feel the difference in speed big time. It happened to me recently on a laptop with only 600 passmark CPU points.

Comparing browsers peformance is not that simple, due to the immense complexity. The only part that's significantly faster in chrome is the JS engine (V8). The CSS engine, for example, is much faster in firefox (try stylebench if you don't believe me) - at least it was last time I tried it. Here are some benchmark results for comparison: https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60

Also, firefox uses much less resources (CPU/Ram), so it consumes less battery and doesn't slow down other programs as much while it's running in the background.

If you're gonna be like that I could also suggest to OP to move to Windows or MacOS 🤷‍♂️

Given the stranglehold that Chrome-based browsers have on the market, I'd say it's the opposite.

Semi-random guess: try turning off hardware video acceleration in Brave (assuming it has an option for that—I've never actually used it).

(The chain of logic here: mesa uses llvm for some kind of realtime . . . something . . . if you have an AMD graphics card. Not clear on the details, but it's the only reason I have llvm installed. And the symptoms seem consistent with video accel breakage.)

Actually, I do have an AMD GPU and I did try that and it worked but I made the mistake of re-enabling it and now the settings page just looks like this:

Is there a way to change that setting through the terminal?

Try restarting your X server (or Wayland or whatever) first if you haven't done so, just in case flushing any surviving copy of the old llvm .so out of memory does the trick (unlikely, but it can't do any harm).

If it doesn't, well, the setting has to be stored somewhere, but if it isn't in a plain text file somewhere in .config, you'll need to talk to the people working on Brave to find out which file it is and how to edit it.

The last-ditch method would involve using a symlink to the new llvm .so to trick Brave into thinking the old llvm .so is still there. That may fix the hardware acceleration temporarily, or do nothing, or crash Brave or your system, so probably not worth it in this case. (For most other missing-library cases this trick is harmless, but I'm not sure of the interactions of llvm, mesa, kernel video drivers and the browser in this case.)

I just installed the flatpak version of Brave and that's working fine.

Makes sense, I guess—presumably it brought enough of its own libs with it that the discontinuity doesn't bother it.

You could check synaptic package manager to maybe see about rolling it back https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=179192

Though keep in mind that trying to roll back a particular dependency couldbee a good way to run into problem's.

You could also try re-install Brave and/or try installing as a flatpak to see if those fix it without rolling back

I don't know if the link you gave is relevant to my issue because it seems to be for reverting Mint system updates while I'm just trying to revert a library update.

Also, how would it cause problems if the previous version worked fine?

Sorry, I've never tried to revert a package but I "think" synaptic can revert packages (system or otherwise) and shared it because I wanted to make sure it works on Linux mint. Maybe I should have clarified that's more of a "best guess" on my part than something I'm sure of.

The risk of rolling it back is even if brave works fine with an older version, if a different piece of software was tested with the newer version and expects it you could end up with a situation where other pieces of software that depend on it either break or keep trying to force you to update.

If you have a system backup and all you're risking is time then I'd say go for it, just wanted to bring up the potential risks and some other options as well.

I tried using Synaptic but it's only listing the current version so I guess I can't use that.

As for the system backup, it's a few days old but I don't think I did anything with it that I couldn't replace. I just mostly don't want to because, assuming that Brave is the only thing that broke, Firefox works fine still. If I can't get Brave or another Chromium browser to work, I can just use Firefox for the time being and hope the issue gets fixed later. Although, I'd need to know how to set up and use multiple Firefox profiles. which I used to know how to do on Windows but I was never able to find out how to do this on Linux.

In the case of Firefox profiles maybe I can actually provide some useful info this time.

"firefox -ProfileManager" brings up the GUI profile manager and "firefox -P [profile name]" boots a particular profile.

Anyway, good luck.

That works, I can't seem to get it to work quite like how I had it on Windows but manually launching a second instance with the other profile from the first instance is fine. If you must know why I'm doing it like this, I use one profile that doesn't have any extension installed and another that does.

Hmm, yeah. We need ostree after all. So unfortunate Fedora is the only group of people working on it.

Recently checked ,Ubuntu already removed more old version libllvm15 from their repo ,only new one available.But I am not recommended u to use brave browser they are lieing about privacy things,if u really need chromium engine and deleted bad things of google ,try ungoogled chromium :)

I don't really use it for the privacy stuff, I only used it because it performs better than Microsoft Edge (which yes, there is a Linux version of Edge).

Vivaldi is a very impressive chromium browser.

I have heard of that browser before but I've never used it. I might try it out.