Noobs last week updates broke fonts except for firefox

Shortly fonts are messy randomly for many apps after this weeks updates.
yad welcome,chromium,edge,signal etc..

The fonts either all get blurred totally unreadable or just certain characters randomly.

Have tried several tricks found from various forums basically addressing reinstallation of fonts, changing fonts so far less problems with Liberation sans, but its not as readable like Noto sans was before upgrade. Also toggling antialiasing switches, iterated all combinations.

Fiddling various files in place (sorry didn’t concentrate why these are needed, just iterating):

sudo ln -sf /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/11-lcdfilter-default.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/ 
sudo ln -sf /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

Also fiddled with:

.config]$ tree fontconfig
fontconfig
├── conf.d
│   └── 20-no-embedded-bitmaps.con
└── fonts.conf

Where

$ cat fontconfig/conf.d/20-no-embedded-bitmaps.con

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "urn:fontconfig:fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
      <bool>false</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

And
$ cat fontconfig/fonts.conf

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'urn:fontconfig:fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
 <!-- 
 Artificial oblique for fonts without an italic or oblique version
 -->
 <match target="font">
  <!-- check to see if the font is roman -->
  <test name="slant">
   <const>roman</const>
  </test>
  <!-- check to see if the pattern requested non-roman -->
  <test compare="not_eq" name="slant" target="pattern">
   <const>roman</const>
  </test>
  <!-- multiply the matrix to slant the font -->
  <edit mode="assign" name="matrix">
   <times>
    <name>matrix</name>
    <matrix>
     <double>1</double>
     <double>0.2</double>
     <double>0</double>
     <double>1</double>
    </matrix>
   </times>
  </edit>
  <!-- pretend the font is oblique now -->
  <edit mode="assign" name="slant">
   <const>oblique</const>
  </edit>
  <!-- and disable embedded bitmaps for artificial oblique -->
  <edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap">
   <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <!--
 Synthetic emboldening for fonts that do not have bold face available
 -->
 <match target="font">
  <!-- check to see if the weight in the font is less than medium which possibly need emboldening -->
  <test compare="less_eq" name="weight">
   <const>medium</const>
  </test>
  <!-- check to see if the pattern requests bold -->
  <test compare="more_eq" name="weight" target="pattern">
   <const>bold</const>
  </test>
  <!--
                  set the embolden flag
                  needed for applications using cairo, e.g. gucharmap, gedit, ...
                -->
  <edit mode="assign" name="embolden">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
  <!--
                 set weight to bold
                 needed for applications using Xft directly, e.g. Firefox, ...
                -->
  <edit mode="assign" name="weight">
   <const>bold</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
   <const>hintslight</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="rgba">
   <const>rgb</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <dir>~/.local/share/fonts</dir>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>

And yes I have fcit5x うつくしです to support japanese hiragana,katakana and kanji inputs. But I doubt it has impact on this font rendering challenge.

I have strong feeling that this somehow related to my lowend old laptops graphics card support which got some hit during last weeks updates? I use external curved display and I notice that e.g. playing videos with haruna get vertical stripes if I click the video during the play.
Strangely also avatar icons in Signal for persons get randomly these vertical stripes. Alltogether this smells very delicate issue attacking the fonts and ‘avatars’ and videos sofar.

So I loved the clean install of Endeavouros and the rolling updates every day and the sleek KDE working smoothly, reminded me the tuning of Gentoo but without the manual journey to monitorsyncs or similar. But now I am lost what to do?

What could be solution, e.g. how to reinstall without loosing personal stuff now or anyother tricks to do to recover?

rgrds Vaapo

FYI I have partial success, toggled

  • edge://settings/system/manageSystem: Use graphics acceleration when available - OFF
  • chrome://settings/system: Use graphics acceleration when available - OFF
  • but is this now the right thing to do? And do I have to switch it off on all apps?

rgrds Vaapo

While waiting correct solution, fixed Signal as follows:

cp /usr/share/applications/signal.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
sed -i 's|^Exec=.*|Exec=signal-desktop --disable-gpu|' ~/.local/share/applications/signal.desktop 

But still e.g. screencapture etc. useful tools are blurrying - so this must be temporary solution.

rgrds Vaapo

Quite annoying the kde screencapture is also borked. Tried to switch between wayland and X11, but didn’t help.
What to do ? The reason is very likely in the graphics hardware acceleration updates?