During the first impressions of said distro, what feature surprised you the most?
The old Pardus, YALI was, and still is, the most awesome installer i’ve ever meet. Also Kaptan was amazing
Manjaro, its a clean and simple way to install Arch with lots of good GUI for all the tasks a user needs to do on their system… Then it crash and bricked the install… 3 times.
Anyways I’m on Mint now.
Endeavour os was the great manjaro replacement for mw
Endeavour is Arch and Manjaro isn’t. Endeavour is not a replacement for Manjaro for that reason alone.
“I installed distro B over distro A” does not mean “distro B is a replacement for distro A”. They can be wildly different and it could be very misleading for someone looking for something that’s actually similar to distro A.
While I agree with you, what is attractive about Manjaro that you want that EOS does not offer?
I also tend to see EndoeavourOS as a great Manjaro replacement because what I want is a high-quality, opinionated, and easy to install no-nonsense distro that offers a massive repository of very up-to-date software in its repos.
I used to think Manjaro looked better but I installed it recently and I did not like it as much as the default EOS look. Perhaps I am just conditioned.
The only thing that stands out for me that people might prefer about Manjaro is the graphical package management. Of course, it is a one-time, one line command to install the very same package manager in EOS that Manjaro uses. Does that disqualify EOS as a Manjaro replacement?
First of all would be the fact that Endeavour is basically just an installer. It should have been an alternative offered by Arch alongside archinstall. I know it also offers some desktop setup but IMO that’s too little to qualify as a distro. You can replicate looks and themes fairly easily. Might as well install Arch.
…but I don’t want Arch because I’m at a point where I want my desktop distro to be boring and predictable, so it enables me to focus on other things. Arch needs more maintenance than I’m willing to put in. But I also want a rolling distro and having recent-enough packages.
Manjaro is a unique combination of rolling and stability. It’s that combo that’s the main factor but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoy not having to ever think about the graphics drivers, or about the kernel, and it’s nice to have a graphical package manager.
As a sidenote, Garuda goes the extra mile and adds similar quality-of-life tools, while staying true to Arch repos. I think Garuda should get the publicity as an actual alternative in-between Arch and Manjaro, rather than Endeavour.
Ok I understand the technical reality you poin to, I just refer to the user experience. For a normal user, you probably won’t notice that technically manjaro is not arch and EOS is. IMHO Manjaro breaks a lot and EOS just works and needs less manteinance.
How long have you been using each of them? In my years-long experience it’s been the exact opposite. Manjaro goes out of its way to not break anything and offers safety measures out of the box to recover if something should break. Arch doesn’t care, it introduces breaking changes all the time and expects its users to be able to cope with them.
They target very different types of users and have very different goals. Manjaro explicitly tries to be stable and user-friendly whereas Arch exclusively caters to advanced users and aims to be customizable above all.
You can achieve the same with Arch that you get out of the box with Manjaro but it’s not there by default – because that’s not something a lot of Arch users are seeking.
For a normal user, you probably won’t notice that technically manjaro is not arch and EOS is.
What’s a “normal” user? On Linux you get all sorts. But you will most definitely notice a difference between daily driving Manjaro vs driving Arch.
Sorry for my ignorance, Linux noob here, but what do you both mean by Manjaro isn’t Arch?
I used manjaro for 3 years or so and then been using EOS for similar time. Manjaro broke a lot of times. EOS is more stable for me.
How did it crash?
Manjaro is a very opinionated distro and has a certain way of doing things. There’s also a lot of bad advice online that tells you to do exactly the things that will break it. Doing things like using an experimental kernel, switching to unstable branch, using Arch repos, installing graphical drivers outside its driver tool, installing critical packages from AUR, using Arch-specific config commands and so on.
Manjaro will work perfectly if you let it work the way it was designed, but lots of people don’t. Those people would be much better off using Arch or one of the Arch derivates that stay true to the way Arch does things.
Messing with Manjaro then complaining “it broke” is like using a toothbrush to slice bread and complaining it’s not working. Well, it’s the wrong tool for what you wanted, of course it won’t work.
For me it was installing apps from the AUR, like Intel Compute. Had dependency issues and errors every time other packages updated and when I tried to fix it, other modules would uninstall, and break my DE, or put my machine in an unrecoverable state.
It’s not as bad as that time my btfs file system broke randomly in Fedora, since I was able to recover my data. But it always felt like an endless battle with the distro to keep it going. Which is why I moved to mint.
I know it was a Manjaro issue since when I attempted to move to EndevorOS the issues were gone… though I dont like it as a distro (I.e. why isn’t a package manager gui installed by default)
I believe intel-compute-runtime is in the official packages, why install from AUR?
Can’t remember any more, either it was installed along side another package, or it was installed because of intel openCL support. Either way it’s been over a year since my last Manjaro install borked, and I’ve been running (and upgraded) Linux Mint.
I was surprised, in a bad way, at how difficult it is to get any VNC running. I tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and base Debian, but couldn’t get any VNC working. The closest I got was with Debian, but it gave me a different desktop than what was coming out the video port to my monitor. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone has had better luck with anything.
Use Remmina on the client and then install anything that opens and listens to VNC ports. For example TightVNC or RealVNC.
Just even a small sys admin tip for Android phones
- For VNC - AVNC
- For SSH - ConnectBot
x11vnc works a dream once you have a systemd service running it on boot, but that rules Wayland out.
You may be able to get similar results by explicitly instructing the others to share display :0, otherwise they default to starting new sessions.I can’t remember if I have Wayland on my Debian installation with XFCE. I installed it several months ago, so I will check.
X11vnc works like a dream on X11, couldnt agree more.
There is wayvnc for Wayland supposedly to solve the same problem, but I havent tried it myself yet
I’ve taken a couple of pokes at it with no results. I’ll just have to sit down with it some day and figure it out.
Manjaro and Ubuntu surprised me how bad they are
Manjaro is the only distro I’ve tried whose live image worked flawlessly, out of the box, and did everything I could think of, first try.
Granted this was 5 years ago when I set down to find an alternative to Ubuntu. Maybe today there are more distros that can do that.
At the time I tried all the usual suspects that are supposed to provide a user-friendly, gamer-friendly desktop experience and they all came short — except one.
That sold me. And it was surprising because I didn’t really expect to find such a distro, I was just thinking I will make a list of what doesn’t work out of the box on each, and pick the one with the least stuff. I didn’t expect a distro to have no list.
Kurumin Linux, which was a Brazilian distro based on Knoppix. This was back in 2006 or so, and that was my first hands-on experience with Linux.
I don’t fully remember whether everything worked out of the box, I think it connected to the internet no problem (cable), but what amazed me was:
1 - It ran off the CD drive without needing to install anything 2 - It had loads of preinstalled utility software 3 - Less than 700MB
Sabayon. It worked perfectly till I tried to update some stuff 💣
This was one the most stable and at the same time the most unstable distribution I ever tried.
Pop OS has worked out well for me even better than Ubuntu & Fedora.
I was surprised by how well Garuda KDE just… Works. Many users warned me to stay away from the smaller distros like Garuda but I’ve had zero issues after 6+ months of everyday use on 2 devices.
Antergos (rip). It just worked. None of the weird problems I’ve had with Ubuntu/Debian
Ironically arch, the only issues I have when using it are usually just sound issues, which simply occur before a pipewire update, during one, or right after one. A reboot or two fixes things for me :p I get to enjoy a lightweight system without efforts I’m not willing to put:) (the features I guess are that it breaks a lot less than I expected, and that arch + i3 legit use around 450mb on idle for me ☠️)
Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.
Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don’t want or don’t know how to compile stuff from source.
Arch Linux has by far the best community, the support wiki is the most useful wiki to Linux there is, it basically covers everything. Mad props to the arch Linux community.
Agree, but mad props to the Gentoo people too. Nice community and incredible wiki as well.
I heard all the stability concerns when I first started using it. That was in 2008. It’s been my main distro ever since. Apart from 2 or 3 major changes over the years (eg, the infamous /usr/lib migration) it’s been rock solid and very up to date
Yeah I feel like even if arch is a little easier to break than other distributions, it’s also way way easier to fix which basically cancels it out.
I second this - for some reasons, my (almost) first distro was arch (first was a fedora for 3-4 days). Arch is great if you know what you are doing, you can have a lean mean compute machine
Puppy linux seems like its still one of the more unique Linuxes around. Its my go-to when I need to do a recovery for family/friends and seems to almost work with any system. If it can, it will load its entire system into the RAM and go to town. If it cant. then it will act like a live disk…but you can “save” the OS multiple different places. Its a fun little OS.
I ran Puppy as a daily driver for about a year before I finally got a new hard drive for that computer. It’s surprisingly robust for such a tiny footprint.
If you like Puppy, also have a look at Easyos. Created by Puppy’s orginal creator.
Ha. Was about to say the same. Running EasyOS on one ofy extra partitions for testing, and I end up using it as semi-daily driver often due to how light it is. Great on a USB key, too.
It is also somewhat unique, on top of other Puppy distros.
Debian. Since so many distros are based of it I always thought of it to be a stripped down, minimal and basic distro, but after daily driving for a year now in suprised how feature complete and pleasent it is out of the box with kde DE.
Yeah, I tried a variety of Debian based distros to start my Linux journey and but eventually just settled on Debian stable and haven’t looked back.
Alpine It just gives me the system and go “do whatever” It’s snappy, decluttered, doesn’t get in the way It doesn’t have a bazillion systemd components, it’s as barebones as it can be
@AkatsukiLevi @Sunny Alpine’s installer is simplest indeed, and it just works. very similar to OpenBSD
And due to just being a bunch of scripts, if shit goes wrong you just know why it went wrong
