 One of the most popular desktop Linux distributions is Manjaro and Manjaro has always been one of my personal favorite Linux distributions. I've run Manjaro for long periods on some of my production machines and Manjaro just a few hours ago pushed out a brand new release. They released version 21.3 and Manjaro has three main flavors. They have their XFCE edition. They have their KDE Plasma edition and then they have a GNOME edition. Those are the three official flavors of Manjaro. And on this channel I almost always look at either the XFCE edition or the KDE Plasma edition because I've never been a fan of the GNOME desktop environment but today I wanted to switch it up a little bit. Let's take a look at Manjaro 21.3 with the GNOME desktop. This will be with GNOME 42 for the desktop environment. So I downloaded the ISO for Manjaro 21.3 with GNOME and we have the option here in the boot menu. We have several options. We can change the time zone. We can change the key table. We can change the language. And we can just go ahead and boot directly into our live environment using either the open source drivers or the proprietary drivers. Now because I'm in a virtual machine, the open source drivers will be fine for me on physical hardware. You may need to boot with proprietary drivers, especially those of you that have proprietary drivers for your video cards or your Wi-Fi chips. I'm going to go ahead and boot with open source drivers. And we boot into a very attractive looking GNOME desktop environment. Now I'm going to go ahead and run through an installation of Manjaro because I actually want to save this virtual machine. I use virtual machines of Manjaro for testing my DTOS scripts. So I'm going to go ahead and run through the installation. The other reason I want to run through the installation is because Calamaris had an update. I recently pushed out a new edition of the Calamaris installer version 3.2. Calamaris was created originally by the Manjaro team. Of course, Calamaris is a dystro agnostic installation program. Any distribution can use the Calamaris installer, which is why so many of them choose to use this particular installer. So on the welcome screen, it has chosen American English for the language. That's correct for me. So I'll just click next. And then we have the time zone information. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me, so I'll click next. And then keyboard layout. It has correctly chosen English US for me. That is correct. So I'll just click next. And then we get to the partitioning. Now you have two choices. You can either erase the disk and give the entire drive to Manjaro. That's typically what you want to do if you're not dual booting. Or you want to do manual partitioning where you set up the partitions yourself. This is important, especially if you're going to dual boot Manjaro alongside another operating system. In this case, I'm going to give the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine to Manjaro. So I'm going to click the first option, erase disk. Then we have the option of what kind of swap do we want? Do we want no swap? Which in a VM is probably what I would do on physical hardware. You probably want to create a swap. And typically you probably want to do a swap file. That's what most people do these days. But you can do swap partitions either with hibernate or no hibernate. For the purposes of this VM, I'm going to create the swap file. And then what kind of file system do we want to create? Extend4 is the default, is kind of the de facto standard on Linux. But you have the option of butterfs, f2fs, or xfs as well. I'm just going to stick with extend4 for now. And then do we want to encrypt the system? You know what? I never do that on these VMs. But for purposes of this VM, I will go ahead and encrypt the drive. So let's create a strong and complicated encryption password. So now that we've done that, I'm going to click next. And then let's create our user. I'm going to call my user DT, and of course his username is going to be DT. Let's create a host name for the computer. I'm going to call this manjaro-vert. And then let's create a strong and complicated password for our DT user. And then repeat the password. And then do we want to use the same password for the administrator account? That's your sudo password. Yes. That way DT's password and the sudo password are the same. That way I don't have to remember two different passwords. Then I'm going to click next. And then we get our summary. Location looks good. Keyboard looks good. The partition scheme looks good. I'm going to click install. And it's going to ask for confirmation. I'm going to click install now. And now it's going to format the drive and start installing manjaro 21.3. This portion of the installation typically takes about five to ten minutes on my equipment. I'll be back once the installation has completed. And I stepped away for about five minutes there to grab me a cup of Joe. Now I don't have any corporate sponsors on this channel, guys. You guys see the box of Joe in the background. Joe's coffee does not sponsor me, but I would be up to it if any of you guys know anyone that works for Joe's brand coffee. Have them call me. Now as you probably noticed about the time I sat down, the installation did complete. You see we get the screen all done. And in the center of the Calamari's installer we have this tick box restart now. Tick that on and click done. And it should reboot the system for you and log us into our freshly installed manjaro 21.3. So that's what I'm going to do right now. And it boots up and you see we get welcome to grub, but before we get anything we have to enter our passphrase for encrypting our drive, right? We encrypted our hard drive, so let's enter the encryption key. And we're at the login manager. Let me click on the DT user and enter DT's password. Before I do that I am going to move my head out of the way. I'm going to check the cogwheel here. Are we using GNOME? Yeah. Or GNOME classic. I wanted to see if actually we were using XORG or Wailin, but they don't even have the two different sessions. They just have GNOME and they don't specify XORG or Wailin. So I'm assuming this of course will be with XORG. Just what I wanted in this VM. X11 works a little better in these VMs than Wailin. Because Wailin can give me some issues. And we log in to our GNOME 42 desktop. The screen resolution is off slightly, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and change to a 1920 by 1080 resolution. So if I hit the super key it brings up our run launcher here in GNOME where we can start searching for an application. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to search for the terminal just because I know exactly what the terminal is as far as I don't know. They have a display program, but I don't know the name of it. So I'm just going to do this at the command line. I'm going to type xranderspace-s for set 1920 by 1080. And that changes us to a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. I'm sure they had a graphical program. If I do the super key and start typing display, yeah, they do have a displays program that would have allowed us to do the same thing. They would have allowed us to change it to 1920 by 1080, but we've already changed it now, so no need to check that out. If you're a first-time Manjaro user, the very first thing you'll notice when you log in to any of their main additions is you get the Manjaro Hello program. This is their welcome screen. And it's very nice, very friendly. You get links to various documentation such as the Manjaro Wiki. You have links to various support forms, mailing lists. You get project information. And then you get these buttons here, applications, and the GNOME layout switcher. If I click on applications, this allows us to, I'm assuming, install some extra software. Yeah. So it looks like by default, of course, Firefox is our browser, but not everybody wants to use Firefox as a browser. So if you wanted to, you could go ahead and tick on to install Chromium. Maybe uninstall Firefox. Or if you like proprietary software, maybe you want to install proprietary Vivaldi or proprietary Opera. Now I typically stay with free and open source software, so I'm just going to leave Firefox, which is already installed ticked on. I'm really not interested in installing any extra software. Geary is there to fault email client. And I love Geary. I think that's a fantastic choice. Thunderbird is also here for those that prefer that. And as far as an office suite, looks like only office is already ticked on. But of course, you have LibreOffice here as well. You also have FreeOffice, which I believe is proprietary software, even though it's called FreeOffice. But many people like that. And of course, you will find other office suites and web browsers and email clients, of course, in the actual repositories. Those were just some of the more popular ones that they're listening under text editors. We have Geedit, of course. That's the standard GNOME plain text editor. But if you wanted to, you can install Micro. You can install Zed. Matter of fact, let's go ahead and tick on Micro because it's such a small program. Let's just see how that works. So let me go ahead and click Update System. And of course, you have to give a password, a sudo password, because it's going to install software, right? It looks like the window is behind our current window. So let me bring that to the forefront there. Yeah, it gives us a summary of what it's about to install. So it's not going to install Micro, and it's got some dependencies that also need to be installed. Yeah, and that works rather nicely. Now let me click the back arrow to go back to the main welcome screen. And let's try GNOME Layout Switcher. So it looks like we have four different layouts. We have the default layout, which we're in right now called Manjaro. Then there is the traditional layout, which places the menu at the bottom. Yeah, and you actually get a traditional kind of menu. Yeah, let's try that. Let's see what that looks like. If I hit Apply, hopefully this won't mess anything up. Yeah, that actually, that looks great. Yeah, I like that. That is really old school, like Windows 7 kind of. It has that same kind of workflow, that same Windows kind of paradigm. I think a lot of Windows users probably would prefer the traditional layout over the standard layout. Then we have a tiling layout. Let's see what that's about. I'm assuming it automatically turns on the tiling functionality. So I already had a window open. So automatically in tiling mode, it goes full screen until I open up something else. For example, let me open up the terminal again. And now, yeah, one takes up one half. One takes up the other if I close. This one goes back to full screen. And of course, we get the panel on the side, kind of an old school Unity style panel. And I like that we have the search menu or the application menu here where when you're searching, everything gets listed here. That's interesting. I'm not totally crazy about that. It's a little strange, but let's try the GNOME layout here. I'm assuming this is going to be the default GNOME 3 kind of or GNOME 42 layout now. And of course, now there's no need for that to be full screen anymore. It's not auto tiling yet. You know what? I'm going to go with the default layout. The one that they shipped with, I think was the best for me. So I'm just going to choose that one. Let's go back to the welcome screen. Also in the welcome screen, you have language choices for the welcome screen. So you get the correct language documentation. You also have social media links. These are official manjaro social media links. You also have the option to tick on and off, whether the manjaro welcome screen launches on auto start, meaning every time you log in, this automatically starts, which is the case right now. Really, after you see it one time, you can probably just turn it off and never see it again. And of course, if you need the welcome screen later, you can always find it. Remember, the name of the program is manjaro hello, if I can type hello correctly, there's manjaro hello. Now being GNOME 42, one of the things that manjaro was working on with this release was getting the dark theme, the global dark theme to work. So if I look for system settings, yeah, there it is, settings, and let's go into appearance. And now in appearance, you have these global light and dark modes that you can turn on and off. Right now the dark mode is turned on. That is the default. If I turn the light mode on, you know, now I get, of course, a light GTK theme. That's really nice. The menu systems or the panels and everything are still a dark color. So it's kind of a mixture, which they kind of reflect that on the light mode. You see white windows, dark windows and dark, everything is dark. You do have the option of changing the background, of course, here. So these are your wallpapers. And it looks like, I don't know if I've seen these wallpapers before. Let me move some of the windows out of the way so you guys can see some of these really fantastic photographs. Some of the nature stuff looks really good. Yeah, I kind of like that. Yeah, I kind of dig that picture there. Of course, we have your traditional manjaro kind of abstract art, which some of these, I don't know if I'm crazy about. But I'm assuming this one here that's got the divider that changes, that's probably set up on a timer where it swaps between the two images, which could be cool. And we've got some more really just gorgeous photography pictures here. I'm going to go back to the default picture though, which is this one here, which does change. So I see what the deal is. It's not actually set up on a timer. Whether you change from light, I don't know why I didn't notice that before. Light to dark. So light to dark. That's the divided backgrounds. So if I go back to these and I choose that one, so we get the light background, right? The green, but it's going to change to the orangish brownish one if I choose dark. Very cool. Yeah. I'm really digging that. That's one of the things I really appreciate about the new GNOME 42 is these global light and dark modes because that was always an issue. It's still kind of an issue really with every Linux desktop environment is changing everything over to a global dark theme. It's never quite worked right. And also depending on whether you're doing a light theme or a dark theme, you always want to change wallpapers because really the best wallpapers for a light theme are dark wallpapers and the best wallpapers for a dark theme are light wallpapers just for the contrast, right? So it's nice that they have that tied into changing the theme as now you also change the wallpaper with it. And then we have more settings here in the system settings. This is just the standard stuff like your default power settings, your default display settings, mouse and touchpad, which I'm not using a touchpad of course on this computer. At the bottom, if I click on about, let's get some about information here. So you get some information, of course, about my virtual machine in this case, but I wanted to see what GNOME version we were on. We are on version 42.2 and we are using X11 for our windowing system, which I kind of already knew that when the XRender command worked earlier, I kind of assumed we were using X. Let's check out the software center, the graphical software center here in Majoro GNOME. So of course this is GNOME software center. And of course we could click on the update button just to update our system, which being a rolling release, we could have had some updates, but since this was again just released less than 24 hours ago, I kind of expected not to get any. Of course, if I click on the installed button, this is all the programs currently installed. Now if you click on the trash can, you could remove these programs or you could browse programs to actually install. Of course you have a search menu here. For example, I searched for H-top, which may or may not already be installed. It's already installed, but if it wasn't, I could have searched for it. And then instead of the trash can, I'd have the download button here, the install button, I just click on that, give it my sudo password and it will install the program for me. Interesting enough, we have this repositories tab here. Let me get rid of that. I click on repositories. Yeah, core repositories, that's the Manjaro core repositories. There's the extra repositories. There's the community repository and there is the multi-lib repository. So your 32-bit libraries, that's especially important for you gamers. You're going to need that for certain games to work. That's nice that it breaks it down by repository. For a graphical software center, there's actually quite a lot of advanced options here. If I go into the menu system here and go into preferences, let's give it sudo password. You need sudo privileges to change, I'm assuming. Some of the settings in here, yo, yeah. Okay, so we have the option to automatically download updates. So just turn that on, you'll automatically update. That way you don't even have to think about it. That's interesting. Parallel downloads. It's already set to four, but you can adjust the parallel download size. You get some refresh mirror options here as well. In the advanced tab here, you also have the option to enable downgrading packages. I've never seen that before. Is that new? Or maybe I've just missed it. But downgrading a package is not necessarily always a safe thing to do, but sometimes you have to do it on ArchBase systems especially. So that's nice that is an option. I would probably turn that on for myself. You also have ignore upgrades. So these are packages I never want to update. For example, if it's a package you depend on for your work, right? You never want an update to break it. So you just pin it so it's never updated. So for example, if I wanted to make sure, Htop never receives an update, could I just do that? Choose and now ignore upgrades, Htop. It's listed in that really nice third party stuff. I'm assuming this is where, yeah, we can turn on the AUR, which almost every Manjaro user is probably going to want to do that. I know I certainly would because most of the programs that I'm going to install are probably going to be found in the AUR. And what else could we turn on? We can go ahead and enable flatpacks. We could also go ahead and enable snap support. I'd probably just turn them all on. Even if you never happen to install a snap or a flat bag, or surely you're going to install something from the AUR at some point, there's no harm in turning those on, just so if you ever need a package from any of those repositories, they are available for you. Yeah, that's software center. I've got to admit that is pretty slick. There are so many advanced options in there. I really didn't expect. Just quickly, I'm going to open the applications menu just to see what is installed out of the box. So these are the default programs in the current version of Manjaro GNOME. And of course, we had Geary, our email client. We have G-Thumb, we have Layouts, the Layout, that's the Layout switcher. Lollipop is our audio player videos. That's GNOME videos, which is your movie player, of course. Cheese is your webcam app. And then you have a lot of subcategories here. For example, accessories, and then you have things like GNOME weather, GTK hash, logs, tweaks. That's the GNOME tweak tool. Yeah, so this is where you can do some more customization options to the GNOME desktop. You have a games category that's got a few of your standard GNOME GTK games like Mines and Chess. And you have your office category, which has only office and your document viewer, your PDF viewer. And then of course, you have your standard system tools. Actually, you get several screens of system tools here. Oh, and TimeShift is here. That's important for taking snapshots. So you can roll back if an update breaks things on you. You have GNOME Boxes, which is a virtualization program, very similar to Vert Manager, which I use for my virtual machines. GNOME Boxes is kind of a similar type program. So yeah, I'm really impressed with the latest GNOME. I'm really impressed with some of the stuff Manjaro is doing with their custom applications. Now, we should actually talk about, for those of you that are on Manjaro, you don't actually have to go and get Manjaro 21.3 and reinstall if you're already on Manjaro. It's a rolling release, it's based on ARCH, meaning when you update your system, you're always on the latest release. And you can actually verify this. If you actually do LSB underscore release, this is a standard Linux command, I believe it's part of the GNU core utils. So do LSB underscore release space and give it this flag dash DRC. And if you hit enter, you should see description Manjaro Linux, your distribution release 21.3 codenamed Rua, that was the codename for this particular version of Manjaro. So if you were on a previous version of Manjaro, run a Pacman SYU to update your system and then run this LSB underscore release dash DRC command and you should see the following information letting you know that you're already on the latest version of Manjaro. So there you have it. That's a very quick cursory look at the latest release of Manjaro 21.3 codenamed Rua. That was the GNOME edition. And I'm happy I took a look at that. GNOME 42, I gotta say, has really impressed me. I never cared for any of the releases of GNOME 3, which GNOME 3 was around for nearly a decade and it started off really buggy, really bad. And honestly, even as it improved, I never really kind of liked the workflow, but I can say GNOME 42, they really put some spit and polish on it. And I do think that some of the work that some of the individual distributions are doing on GNOME, for example, Laboon 2 really makes GNOME into something really nice. Manjaro here makes GNOME into something really nice. I could actually use this. It wouldn't be my first choice just for personal preferences, but if I had to install something like Manjaro GNOME and use it on my main production machine, I would be happy with it. I wanna congratulate the Manjaro team on a job well done with this release. I also wanna congratulate the GNOME team for what they're doing. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. Destin Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Michael Mitchell-Paul, Wes Whiteybald, Homie Allen, Armoredragon, Chuck Commander-In-Rangery, Diyoka, Dylan Marstrom, Hurr-Yan, Alexandra Pease-Archenvedor, Polytech Realiteats, Furlust, Red Prophet Steven, Tools Devler, Willie, these guys. They're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. Joe's brand coffee hasn't called me yet. If they do, great. But until then, I depend on you guys. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. I'd also take a sponsorship from Gillette Fusion. I love their razor blades.