Temporary Forum Oddities

[mnrvovrfc]

How do you like Manjaro? I've heard good things about it and tried it way way back when it first came out in a VM but never gave it too much love.

This is one of the best distros IMHO. It was my first one with KDE Plasma last year.

Indeed, it seems to be the best with KDE but I don't want to sound opinionated. I also have it installed as daily driver with MATE (old GNOME).

It's really not as bad as some people say but it's their fault they have weird configurations, build "dream" desktop and gaming systems with components that don't really match and dedicated to breaking stuff instead of actually using the system. The ongoing things about AMD, NVIDIA, some "nvme" disk drives being incompatible etc. could happen with any distro. Manjaro isn't any different. However because it's based on Arch Linux, it might unsettle someone used to Debian- or Ubuntu-base and isn't called to updating the system as much. I'd say Manjaro could be safely updated once a week. On something closer to Arch, the urge is to do it everyday or every few days but that could get tiresome and it could require a very good system backup/rollback.

If you're that worried about apps not starting "suddenly" after update, then Manjaro (not only Garuda which programmers seem to have broken off Manjaro) could be installed with "btrfs" file system instead of the unofficial standard "ext4". I wouldn't be able to tell you a lot about that. I tried Garuda MATE for a short time but didn't check out how the system snapshot thing worked. For that one installing with "btrfs" and with at least 30GB "root" partition size is a terminal requirement. OTOH could install Manjaro on a slightly smaller partition like I have at least ten times successfully.

Install with GNOME D.E. only if you have a fast, modern computer, not a budget laptop with 4GB RAM like me. Otherwise it will be slow; I couldn't tolerate both GNOME Software and Pamac for installing any software. XFCE is OK too. Those two desktop environments and KDE are the "officially" supported flavors of Manjaro. I said I have MATE but that came from "community" effort and therefore that will suffer progress which is later than the other three. It could be had with Cinnamon, which is Linux Mint's desktop environment, and looks pretty good (like Ubuntu Cinnamon) but it was also too slow on my computer to be tolerable.

Could install applications in Flatpak format but that could eat a lot of memory on the SSD. There are also AppImages for Audacity, Firefox, Inkscape, Libreoffice etc. but less of those than Flatpaks. One good thing about AppImages is that you could just erase it if you don't like it and not have to worry about "residue" of libraries and other junk needed by the program. The only "residue" would be the configuration of the program for the regular user, usually in "/home/(user)/.config". Flatpaks might be the same way but uninstalling "everything" might mean taking down a few modules separately and you have to know which ones. From Ubuntu there's this thing called Snaps that I don't want to go into detail into because they are advertising it as even better than the other two ways described here to provide applications.

I cannot have a virtual machine on my computer, whether or not I have enough memory.