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.
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.