 Manjaro is undoubtedly one of the most popular Linux distributions out there and for good reason. It's very, very good. If you're looking for an arch-based distribution that's easy to install, well maintained, but doesn't have the quote-unquote instability that vanilla arch sometimes has, Manjaro is a very good option for you. And because it's so popular, what I thought I'd do today is talk about five things that you absolutely have to do once you've installed Manjaro for the first time. So that's what we're going to do today. Let's go ahead and jump in. So what we have here is a brand new install of Manjaro. And I've done absolutely nothing to this other than change the display resolution. So this is what you'll get if you install Manjaro for the first time. Now this is the KDE version. If you're using the XFC version, the steps that I'm going to take for today should be exactly the same. It might look a little bit different in certain places like you might be using a different terminal emulator. Other than that, it should be exactly the same. So the first thing that you should do is update your system. Ignore the welcome app, but don't get rid of it yet. Just leave it there. We'll come back to it. And also leave it launch at start because we are going to be rebooting the computer first. So let's go ahead and open up a terminal. You can do this with Ctrl Alt and T. That will open up console or it will open up the XFC terminal if you're using the XFC version. I believe it will also open up the GNOME terminal if you're using the GNOME version. So I'm going to go ahead and zoom in here. And the first thing you'll want to do is update your computer. So you do sudo pacman dash s, y, y, u, hit enter, enter your root password, which you set up on install, hit enter, and it will then update your system. Go ahead. Yes. Now, because this is an ArchBase distro, the number of updates it will have will depend on when you're actually updating your system and how old the ISO is. So if it's a brand new ISO, the updates may be minor. If it's a older ISO, you may have more updates like me. I have quite a few updates here that it's actually going to install. Actually, holy man. That's a lot of them, but we'll go ahead and we'll hit yes again. Apparently I hit yes too many times. Apparently YY is not an acceptable answer, which is okay. So I'll go ahead and let that go ahead and update. And then when it's done, I will reboot the computer. Okay. So as you can see, this update is still going and I realized something. This is why is this going so slow? I'm so used to ArchUpdates going fast, but it's not actually going fast. I'm going to actually cancel this because I know exactly what's wrong. So I'm going to hit control C to cancel that. It shouldn't do anything bad canceling it because it's just downloading. It hasn't started installing anything yet. So what's the problem here? And you're going to actually get a bonus thing here because I wasn't planning on showing you how to do this because I thought that this would be enabled by default, but it's not. Pac-Man allows for parallel downloads, but apparently Manjaro has not enabled that by default. In order to enable that, you have to CD into slash Etsy. And then we'll do an LS here. And then somewhere in here, there should be a pac-man.conf.d, I think is what it's called. Let's see what it says. It's called pac-man.conf. So we're going to vim into that. So we're going to do sudo vim, which it looks like vim is not installed. So we're going to go ahead and sudo. Fine. Fine. We'll just use nano. This is going to be painful. So we're going to do sudo nano and then pac-man.conf. Okay. And then we're going to scroll down here. Oops. I forgot I'm not in vim and it uses the arrow keys like a caveman. Scroll down here all the way down to this part here. Uncommon this line here where it says parallel downloads. And I'm going to actually change this to 10. Now if you have slower internet, you'll probably want to leave that at 5. I'm not in vim at jesus. There we go. And now we're going to quit this. So we're going to ctrl x, y for yes, enter to save. Now if we do sudo pac-man dash syyu, it'll actually go much, much faster. Watch this. Yeah, that's much better. Now I will cut the video and I won't have to sit here for as long as I would have had if it was, you know, having to do that all one at a time. Okay. Once your system is updated, you'll see something like this. And the next thing you'll want to do is reboot your system. So you can do that. Do sudo reboot. And then it will reboot just like so. And this won't take too long at all. We'll get a gigantic cursor there for just a second. And then we're rebooted to enter the password. And when we're back to where we were before. Now the next thing you'll want to do is something that it doesn't really apply to everyone, but it's something that you should keep in mind no matter what. And that is one of the coolest things about Manjaro is that it gives you the ability to select your kernel that you use very easily. So if we open up the menu here and type in kernel, we can find this little application here, which I've actually baked into the KDE Plasma settings. And then we can choose what kernel we want. Now, a few things here. For most people, the one that is default, which is the 5.15.25 kernel is the one that you should use. You should just go ahead and stick on it. It's the LTS kernel. It's going to work for the most hardware out there. Not the newest stuff. But for the vast majority of hardware, this will be the perfect one to use. And you should just move on with your day. For anyone else, if you want to use something a little bit newer, you can use one of the newer kernels. Specifically, you may want to do this if you're using newer hardware. If you just bought a new computer, whatever, and it has a brand new graphics card in it, you're going to want something that is newer. I would avoid the release candidate that hasn't been tested. Obviously, that's still basically a beta. So get this one here if you have brand new hardware. And I would not suggest going older than this, unless you absolutely have to. If you're running really, really old hardware, then maybe go back to one of the other LTSs that is still supported, like 4.14 or something. But that's only in very rare cases. Now, this does only support the mainline kernel branch. It doesn't support anything like Xen or the Harden kernel. If you want to install something like that, you'll have to do that on your own. There are money guides out there that you can do that with. But for this, it's just the mainline kernel. I'm not going to mess around with the kernel on this machine. It works just fine. The LTS is the one that I would stick with on if I were just going to use this. But I just wanted to point out that if you want to, or if you think you need to, you can change the kernel to something that will more suit the hardware that you're on. The next thing that you'll want to do, and this, again, will not apply to everybody, is that you want to install proprietary drivers. So if you have a GPU made by NVIDIA, you'll need a proprietary driver. Now, I can't show you this because I'm in a virtual machine, but basically what you want to do is go into the system settings, go to hardware configuration, and then in this spot here, you'll see a list of drivers that you can choose. Now, obviously because I'm in a VM, I'm only going to have the drivers for the virtual machine. If you have an NVIDIA card, you'll see other options here for certain NVIDIA drivers that are proprietary. You'll want to go ahead and install those because the open source drivers for NVIDIA, well, they suck. They're just really bad. So you'll want to install the proprietary driver that is suitable for your card. Now, it will only show you ones that will actually work with your card, as far as I'm aware, and if you want to install it, you just right click on this, install, it'll install it, then it'll ask you to reboot your computer. Once you've rebooted, you'll have those drivers enabled by default. And I highly recommend again everybody who has an NVIDIA GPU to do that. Now, moving on to a tip that will actually apply to everybody. The next thing you'll want to do is enable the AUR. Now, by default, the AUR is not enabled in Menjar. You have to either install an AUR helper or you have to enable the AUR and PAMAC. So what we're going to do actually is open up PAMAC. Just type in PAMAC. It will come up with add or remove software. This is what PAMAC looks like. Now, in order to enable the AUR, click these hamburger button. Go down to preferences, enter your password, go to third party, click enable AUR support, and then you can leave the rest of these unchecked if you want. But I'm going to check for updates, check development packages for updates, and keep built packages just in case, because sometimes you need to downgrade. So, and then once you've done that, you can hit close, and that's it. And then you can search for things that are also included in the AUR. So, for example, how about Audacium? I know that that one is in the AUR. Yeah, right there. So you can see that the AUR is notated right there. That's what it's telling you where it's coming from, and you can just download that and then use PAMAC just like you normally would. If you don't know how to use PAMAC, just hit the button, hit apply, and then it will start installing. So I'm gonna cancel on that, I don't actually need that. So we're gonna cancel that. But it's really easy, it's not hard at all. So once that's done, the last thing you'll want to do before you can start using your repeater is install some of the software that you need to use. And you can use PAMAC if you want to. There's nothing wrong with PAMAC, it's perfectly fine things. If we open up that again, you can go through the categories and it'll actually show you music and audios and stuff like that. It's curated as what you'd expect on like a GNOME software center or whatever. It's just a list of things that match this particular category. Personally, I don't like PAMAC all that much, so I'm not gonna use that. If I were to install software, I'd probably do it through the terminal, but there is another way. So you can find the welcome screen, which is why we left this open, hit this button applications here, and Manjaro has actually gone through and curated several different applications in several different categories that you can install. So for example, it tells you that you have Firefox installed, but you can install any of these other ones here, including Chromium and Vivaldi. Email here is the same, and text editors if you want, ebook readers, extended language support for certain applications, office suites, because by default, LibreOffice is not installed. You only get only Office, which is, I don't know why you'd want to use that personally, but whatever suits your boat. And basically you can just go through any of these categories, and install the ones that you want to, or select the ones that you want to install. So we just do this, and then click X Reader if you want, whatever, just select whatever ones you want, and then hit update system, apply current selections, and then do your password, enter your password, and then it will install the packages. It might ask you to choose different things here. Usually, I'm thinking that the best way to do that is just to go ahead and select all of them. You'd rather have the dependencies than not have the dependencies, and then hit apply. I'm not actually sure why I failed to update the AUR, probably because we need to do an SYYU. So in order to do that, you just open up terminal sudo pacman dash, oops, if you can spell dash SYYU, Y, and then enter password. Oh, it's because I'm already using that. It's like I've never used ours before, but the point is, is that if you get an error, you may end up having to update your mirrors, especially if you've already, if you just went through and enabled AUR, you'll have to update the mirrors of the AUR in order to actually download from it. So why their graphical installer just doesn't do that? I mean, it seems like it would, but whatever. So those are the five things you should do if you're just installing Manjaro. Now, I know a couple of them only apply to certain people, but it's definitely important for those people who those things do apply for it to actually do those things. And if you aren't in the club of having an NVIDIA GPU, and that tipped in and applied to you, maybe it'll apply to you someday. And now you know. So if you have other tips that could be helpful for other people, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Sid A Devon, Patrick O'Maglin, Jackson F. Tool, Steve A. Sebraga Linux, Gary, Samuel, Mitchell, ArtCenter, Carbon Data, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Martin E. Andy, Mary, Kamp, Drashwood, J-Dog, Peter A. Crucible, Dark Beneath Six, Vlad A. Primus. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.