TR Forums

whm1974 wrote:

Drat, and here I was just thinking I found the perfect distro...

Yeah, I went through an eval period a year and change ago, thinking the same thing. Arch-based, but with a focus on making esoteric graphics setups 'just work' sounded pretty great, but while other Arch variants have budded off, Manjaro snapped the branch off entirely.

Maintaining the primary bulk of a package repo is a ton of thankless, unglamorous work. Even now, after years and years of divergence, Ubuntu still leans on Debian for something like 80-90% of their packages, with minimal to no changes. It just doesn't make sense for a smaller, niche distro like Manjaro to completely reproduce all the work Arch does in validating and QA'ing the main repos, yet they insist they will do exactly that.

I think in a year or two Manjaro will re-merge with upstream Arch, either partially or completely. Until then, though, it's just packages delayed for their own sake, and the Manjaro-specific stuff has had enough minor bugs to put lie to their claims of being Arch plus an extra layer of QA/testing.

Just to be clear, I think the idea of Arch plus more testing, plus validated "checkpoint" snapshots is a fine idea, but taking on such a massive task with the manpower and resources of a small distro is foolhardy at best.

I think in a year or two Manjaro will re-merge with upstream Arch, either partially or completely. Until then, though, it's just packages delayed for their own sake, and the Manjaro-specific stuff has had enough minor bugs to put lie to their claims of being Arch plus an extra layer of QA/testing.

Well I already installed this, so I'll use try for awhile and see how it goes.

I kinda wish Manjaro were Redhat or Debian based (for the sake of package installs) - that would make it damned close to perfect. Eh, I'll play around with it some more (on metal) after winter break.

whm1974 wrote:

Drat, and here I was just thinking I found the perfect distro...

There is no "perfect" distro. All of them are tradeoffs in one way or another; all you can really do is engage in a little optimization to find the distro whose shortcomings are least annoying to you, given your specific use case.

For me, Kubuntu LTS or Debian Stable (+KDE) seem to be the best fit as my "daily driver". Sometimes I'll set up an Ubuntu or Debian system with LXDE if I want something with a lightweight GUI (i.e. a compromise between a CLI-only install and a full-blown DE).

I used to play around quite a bit with Fedora and non-LTS Ubuntu releases, but not any more. IMO unless your use case explicitly includes "beta test bleeding edge software" or "contribute bug fixes to upstream project(s)", running these types of "throw stuff over the fence and see what happens" distros is mostly going to frustrate you, and you get to do it all over again every 12-18 months. These days I just want my distro to do its job, not get in my way, and not constantly force me to learn new ways of doing things. (Get off my lawn!)

I suppose rolling release distros have the advantage (?) over distros like Fedora in that they spread the frustration out evenly, instead of giving it to you in periodic concentrated bursts.

I suppose rolling release distros have the advantage (?) over distros like Fedora in that they spread the frustration out evenly, instead of giving it to you in periodic concentrated bursts.

At least I don't have about to worry about inplace upgrades messing things up anymore. Plus I can avoid the hassle of doing clean installs.

just brew it! wrote:

whm1974 wrote:

Drat, and here I was just thinking I found the perfect distro...

There is no "perfect" distro. All of them are tradeoffs in one way or another; all you can really do is engage in a little optimization to find the distro whose shortcomings are least annoying to you, given your specific use case.

Amen.

Whilst I fully concur with the criticism Forge wrote concerning the Manjaro repos compared to Arch, I find the distro "good enough" for me in daily production use. I don't exclude awakening my inner nerd once again and go fully Arch in the future. But right now I don't suffer enough annoyances like I did with Ubuntu and Mint for the straw to break the camels back.

boing wrote:
Whilst I fully concur with the criticism Forge wrote concerning the Manjaro repos compared to Arch, I find the distro "good enough" for me in daily production use.

As I'm not doing anything mission criterial my needs are fairly simple. So far Manajro seems to meet those needs.

whm1974 wrote:

I suppose rolling release distros have the advantage (?) over distros like Fedora in that they spread the frustration out evenly, instead of giving it to you in periodic concentrated bursts.

At least I don't have about to worry about inplace upgrades messing things up anymore. Plus I can avoid the hassle of doing clean installs.

Odd corner cases (RAID-1 boot volume with UEFI, anyone? ) aside, clean installs of a stable distro aren't *that* big a deal. All your user-specific stuff is under /home/<username>; and aside from Chrome and the latest VirtualBox, pretty much everything is in the distro's repository. A simple checklist of additional packages to install and tweaks to make to the DE settings pretty much covers it.

just brew it wrote:
Odd corner cases (RAID-1 boot volume with UEFI, anyone? ) aside, clean installs of a stable distro aren't *that* big a deal.

Depends on the distro. Bodhi was a PITA to do clean installs back when I was still using it.

whm1974 wrote:

just brew it wrote:
Odd corner cases (RAID-1 boot volume with UEFI, anyone? ) aside, clean installs of a stable distro aren't *that* big a deal.

Depends on the distro. Bodhi was a PITA to do clean installs back when I was still using it.

Note my use of the qualifier "stable".

Of course.

just brew it! wrote:

Odd corner cases (RAID-1 boot volume with UEFI, anyone? ) aside, clean installs of a stable distro aren't *that* big a deal.

I guess Arch passes your test. I've done exactly that. RAID1 md raid across the whole disk, UEFI booting. It actually wasn't even that hard, using the Architect Linux installer. I've even done the plugs-out test of yanking a disk and continuing to boot.

It's been a week now and haven't ran into any issues yet. Performance is great.

Who is using Manjaro Linux? Well, I am for one, and I am very happy with it. When my wife's old AMD Athelon 64 running Windows Vista started running slow I decided to give it a new lease on life by dumping all the accumulated cruft and installing Win 10. No dice. It choked. Irreconcilable hardware requirements according to the installation manager. The upshot is that the wife got a new Dell desktop with Win 10 preinstalled and I got her old computer to play with. This started my distro hopping experience. Started off with Ubuntu. Same experience as win 10 ... would not install. Ditto Mint. Decided to start at the other end of the spectrum and work my way up, beginning with things like Puppy and SolydX. All rejected for one reason or another, usually just for reasons of personal taste. Then I found Manjaro and was in my happy place. That go me thinking, what could I do with the old Dell Latitude 600 laptop I got at a school district sale. It had a hard life but XP still booted. Wanted to install a ChromeOS, perhaps like via "neverware" but try as I might I could not make it work. Perhaps it was again a compatibility problem, I don't know. What I do know is that now Manjaro is on it, practically a forehead instillation, and is working nicely.

see I just disagree with the whole premise of this thread. isn't all Ubuntu made of fairly recent packages anyway? this is why they have LTS releases isn't it? they don't have a stable.

what is Manjaro anyway? what is there to Manjaro that you couldn't just do to Arch? Manjaro is more stable than Arch anyway so you're really just going from "stable Xubuntu" to "stable Manjaro." if manjaro is Arch's Ubuntu, then I guess that's fine. but jeez if there aren't too many Linux distributions. I would have no reason to switch from Xubuntu to Manjaro in this case.

it's silliness. yes operating systems are fun and rewarding and tinkering with them is fun and rewarding and this is why loads of people work on software but tinkering generally speaking I think would be fine staying at a level higher than just popping OPERATING SYSTEMS on your computer and touring around their defaults for the fun of it.

especially when those damn operating systems are all something like 85% the same anyhow.

there are too many Linux distributions.

@whm1974 -

So are you still using it?

@fhohj -

I both agree and disagree. Yes, the proliferation of distros creates confusion and fragments the ecosystem. But who knows where the next great distro will come from?

just brew it! wrote:

Yes, the proliferation of distros creates confusion and fragments the ecosystem.

That's, exactly what I was saying in another thread, for the most part...

Ubuntu 15's been behaving surprisingly well to me as of late though.

just brew it! wrote:

@whm1974 -

So are you still using it?

@fhohj -

I both agree and disagree. Yes, the proliferation of distros creates confusion and fragments the ecosystem. But who knows where the next great distro will come from?

Yes I am. And I have been having no problems whatsoever. And fhohj, I wanted to check out a rolling release distro and and I wanted more up to date packages then what Ubuntu offers.