 About a month ago on the podcast someone in the chat mentioned that I hadn't really given Manjaro a fair shake and that I had never actually done a lot of content on Manjaro. And they're right. I've never really spent a lot of time in Manjaro, at least not for a couple of years. So I decided at that point that I was going to switch to Manjaro as my main daily driver. I completely wiped out my Arco install. And at the time I was planning on doing a gigantic video of a versus series where I would compare Manjaro, Arco, Endeavor and Garuda all in one video and it would be epic and probably like an hour long. And as my plans for that video grew, I realized that the project was just too large, that the video would be too long. It would take an exorbitant amount of time to actually put together and edit. It just was not something that I was interested in doing. So what I've decided to do instead is go through and do several smaller versus videos where I would will compare several distributions in a more contained and kind of tight form. And that's going to start happening over the next month. The first one will be Manjaro versus Arco. But because I decided to switch to Manjaro, I actually kind of started my long term review process on Manjaro. I've been using it now for a month and I decided that I would go ahead and make one of my long term review videos about Manjaro Linux. So I've been using it now, like I said, for about a month. And I have some thoughts, but I'm going to go ahead and go through the process just like I have with the last few long term review videos. And my thoughts on Manjaro will kind of be sprinkled throughout the process. So if you want to jump to certain parts, I will try to put timestamps down below so you can kind of jump to the things that you're most interested in. But let's go ahead and jump in. The first thing we should talk about, as always, is installation. The installation for Manjaro is not that complicated or special. It uses the Calamari's installer. It offers all the functions that Calamari usually does. And they haven't actually gone through and customized it at all. It's just those vanilla Calamari's installer. And I believe, and I could be wrong about this, that Manjaro was the first distribution to actually use the Calamari's installer. Again, could be wrong about that. But it definitely has not been customized to any extent like you'd see in Arco or Garuda or Endeavour. All those distros have gone through and at least done something to Calamari's. This is the stock experience. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just something that I noticed. Outside of that, the install process was vanilla. Installing it in a VM to shoot the B-roll, I did have some problems actually getting Manjaro to go to the right resolution. I couldn't get that fixed. So you'll notice all the B-roll here for the next two sections is in a constrained resolution. I just couldn't fix that. So that's a vert manager problem. So don't pay too much attention to that. So once I've got it installed, the out-of-the-box experience is fairly vanilla. Now I chose the KDE version to install. And you'll see that I did not actually stay with KDE once we move over to my actual system. But the out-of-the-box experience of the KDE version is fairly plain. Now you will get a welcome screen when you first boot in. And it's okay. There's mostly links there for support and contact and donations and stuff like that. But there is a box there at the bottom that you can click on to see the most popular applications. And you can add and remove those things right there from that application. It's something that I'd never actually seen before. And I'm not sure that it was there the last time I used Manjaro. So if you want to go through and install several applications similar to what you'd kind of do with ARCO during the install process or with Garuda after the install process, you can go through and install the programs you need right from there without having to go deal with PAMAC or Octopus or whatever the hell it's called or deal with the terminal at all. You can just do it from this welcome application. That was kind of neat. Now in terms of pre-installed software, there is not a ton of stuff here. You'll get a lot of the K-suite applications. You'll get a few of the Manjaro built specific tools, things that will allow you to change the kernel and such like that. Things that have been kind of hallmarks of Manjaro for a long time and you'll get only office. I think it's called only office. I can't actually remember what it's called. All I know is it's not LibreOffice. So just be prepared that you're not going to get the LibreOffice installed by default. So you're going to get something else. So that was something that I had to deal with afterwards. I had to uninstall that and install LibreOffice which is what I use. But there's not a ton of stuff installed. There's not a ton of tools. There's not a ton of extravagant applications. It's not huge. And that's a good thing I believe. It's not bloated. It's something that you can go through and install the stuff you need but there's the base minimum there that you can use to get started. So things like Eliza or whatever it's called to do music and there's a video player and there's the standard stuff that you need in order to actually have your operating system function but there's not like six MP3 players and a couple video players. Sometimes the distributions they include multiple different things to do the same thing and it's not a great experience. This does not do that. So let's move on from that. Installing updates and installing software kind of go together. Now I'm a big ArchBaseDistro user so this was nothing new to me. The updates on Manjaro for those of you who've never used it before are going to be a little bit different than every other ArchBaseDistro in that they are delayed. Now how much they're delayed really depends on what updates you're looking at. Sometimes they can just be a few days delayed. Sometimes they can take up to two weeks and the reason why they are delayed is because they're being processed through the Manjaro team in order to try to ensure stability. This is supposed to allow Manjaro to be a little bit more stable than a traditional ArchBaseDistro which pulls updates directly from the ArchRepositories. In my experience it is stable but then I've never had true problems with any other ArchBaseDistro either. So whether or not Manjaro actually makes a difference in that way I'm not sure. I can't really speak to that. I will say that there were a few times during my month that I got a little frustrated with having software that was a little out of date but it's not so much that I really ever cared all that much. Sure I really, really wanted KD Plasma 5.24 right when it came out but because it's the Manjaro repose there wasn't much I could do to do that in order to actually get those. Although I'm sure there was probably a workaround I just didn't look into it too much. I will say that updating on Manjaro feels a lot more like updating a Debian system than an ArchBaseDistro because if you used a traditional ArchBaseDistro or used Vanilla Arch you'll know that if you update every day you're gonna get 10, 15 packages to update maybe even more. Like constantly these updates are coming in over and over and over again. And if you wait like a week like I do I always wait a week. If you wait that week you're gonna on a traditional ArchBaseDistro or Arch you're gonna have hundreds of updates. That's just the way it is. I'm in Jaro even waiting a week I only had like seven updates. It was a really weird feeling. It made me feel like I was using Debian stable. Now I'm assuming that there are some weeks where there are more and some weeks where there are less. So I really don't have a large sample size for that experience. I only updated three times over my whole time using this. And the most I ever had was I think 10. And that's just a really weird experience. Like I said, it makes it feel not like Arch in some ways. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing but it's just something that you should keep in mind. Now installing software there's a couple of ways of doing it. You can use the GUI application called PAMAC and that is a reasonable way of installing software. It's not the cleanest or most store like experience you're going to have but it's not confusing. Out of the box, the AUR is not enabled in that application. So if you want to install stuff from the AUR you have to enable that through a settings menu. Not that big of a deal. Just know that going in that if you're expecting AUR access right out of the box you have to enable it. A PAMAC is fine. It has categories. Things are well organized. It's not a store per se. It's more just a list of software that you can access. It's not curated in any way. It's just there. I do like that you can go through and select multiple things like into a queue and then do all of your install all at once. That's always appealed to me. It's not something you can really do with a lot of other stores. Like if you use the GNOME Software Center for example, you install things one at a time. You'd install this, then you install that, then you install that. That's the way it works. Now obviously if you use a terminal you can install as many things as you want in a single line. Like you can do Pac-Man-S that you know and install that city, Caden live and stuff all at once. Kind of. I mean it does go through and install them one by one but it does that in the GUI application as well. It just, it's kind of the same queuing thing where you do one command it installs several things for you. Whereas with something like GNOME Software you have to go through and install things one at a time. So that's kind of neat. Now in terms of installing stuff from the terminal it's a traditional arch-based distro in that manner. It has Pac-Man. I honestly can't tell you, I can't remember if this has an AUR helper installed. I don't think it does. So if you're gonna want to install things from the AUR you'll have to install an AUR helper. I installed Paru. But again it's been a month so I can't really remember if there's any other AUR helper installed. Like I said I don't think that there is. So now in terms of software availability and we're moving on to the point where we can talk about my actual system and we can actually see my actual system right here. This is what I'm using. So this is I3 and I'm gonna talk a little bit about why I switched to I3 and stuff like that probably in another video but I'll talk a little bit while I'm not using Plasma here in a minute. But first let's stick with software availability and actually follow my little outline that I made just to be organized. So because you have access to the AUR software availability is amazing. There's a good chance that you'll never have an experience where you won't find what you're looking for. If you can't find it in the Manjaro or the Arch3Pose which are enabled by default and can be used using Pac-Man like that. So Audacity, whatever, something like that. Or you can install an AUR helper like I said no matter what you're gonna have a good selection of software probably the best of class. There's not a situation here where you're going to be limited in terms of what software you have access to. Now that being said, AUR holds its own problems like it's not curated by the official Arch developers. So you take on the risk of installing software from the AUR not everything up there is updated. You have the chance of downloading things that are malicious it's a thing. Now in all my years of using the AUR I've never had a problem but that's just because you kind of use your common sense you download things that are still being updated you download things from developers you trust. So just keep your brain in your head and you will probably be fine. Now before we move into gaming and stability and community sport and all that stuff let me talk about why I've moved away from the default plasma install and moved to I3. I had some problems with this KDE plasma install. For whatever reason K-Win kept crashing. Now I don't know if this was a plasma thing or a Manjaro thing but whatever reason K-Win which is the window manager and compositor for KDE plasma it just kept crashing and it's not a good experience when things crash that I had the same problem in MX Linux but the similarities were not really the same in that I expected it from MX Linux because they're using a much older version of plasma. The version that Manjaro uses isn't that old so the fact that I was still having the problems is a little weird. Now I noticed once I did update in the last couple of days those problems went away but prior to that those problems were big pain in the ass. Now I also switched because I just got done using plasma for a whole month on MX and I wasn't really interested in using again. I should have chosen the XFCE version of Manjaro. I would have been happier spending some time and then I could have done a video on it but I just didn't. I'm so used to using the plasma version when I actually do use Manjaro that that's just the one that I automatically downloaded. So what I ended up doing was installing DWM on Manjaro and I used DWM for a while and then I decided I was going to switch to I3. Now I made a video on that. So this is I3 and once I moved away from plasma I've had a perfect experience in terms of actual use of the computer. I've had any problems whatsoever in terms of logging in or actually using the computer. It's just worked flawlessly. Like there's had some good tries. Now I will say that for whatever reason I3 itself doesn't enjoy the fact that when I record the podcast I'm capturing a window that's not in focus. I've had that problem with other window managers as well. That's a window manager problem, not a Manjaro problem. So let's go ahead and move on to gaming. One of the reasons why I switched to Manjaro and was willing to actually wipe out my ARCO install which I really don't like doing because I'm a big ARCO fanboy. One of the reasons why I was willing to do that was because I was having so many problems gaming and that problem was where anything that required proton would allow me to hit the play button. It would sometimes think for a few seconds it would pause and then during that time the blue button that says stop when you use Steam usually when the game's running it says stop there where the play button used to be. And then after a few seconds it would go right back to play. Nothing would happen. And that happened on anything that used proton. Now even changing versions of proton didn't work in ARCO and it was just something that bothered me because I wanted to do some gaming. There were several games that I wanted to play and it seemed that switching to a different distro would hopefully fix it because my Steam stuff worked fine on MX Linux. So it worked fine there. So it couldn't have been my hardware or anything. So that's one of the reasons why I was okay with switching. So I switched to Manjaro. Steam has already installed and I had the same problems. So I went through and tried to play several different games. I had the exact same experience where I hit the play button and it would do nothing for a little while other than change the color of the play button and change the word to stop. It would oftentimes use a little bit more of a little bit more in terms of resources. And then after that, it would just go back to the play button, nothing. So I didn't know what to do. Like I wanted to play games. It seemed like my trip to Manjaro was complete waste, but then I uninstalled Steam and Steam is a custom package for Manjaro and it was installing it and then reinstalling the native version, the one that is actually provided by Steam itself that worked fine. Like now I can go through and run several proton games. It works fine. Overall, the gaming experience between those two games that I've been spending most of my time in lately is perfectly fine. I will say that the Spyro game really does not like my computer all that much. The actual performance is fine, but the thing ramps up my fans like crazy. Like it sounds like an aircraft carrier. Not sure why. The temperatures never really change all that much. And it's not as if it's using a ton of CPU or horsepower or whatever reason, all the fans on my computer turn on when that game plays. It's a weird situation. So that's gaming. Moving on to stability. I haven't had any problems in terms of stability at all. It's updated fine. Now in the past, I've had problems with Manjaro where I would update something, do a reboot after the update, and then I'd come back and it would log into a blank screen. That's one of the reasons why I completely stopped using Manjaro years ago because I kept having that problem over and over again. Now, I've since had that problem on other art space disorders as well. So that's not just a Manjaro thing, but this time I never had that problem. I've never had any issues with that thing that was the thing that I was most worried about in terms of Manjaro because it's a thing that I've experienced several times in the past, but I never had that problem this time. I, other than the KDE Plasma K-Win problems where things were crashing, the K-Win compositor was crashing over and over again, I really haven't experienced anything negative in terms of things crashing. The updates come in at a frequent pace, but they're very layered. Like I said, I never got a lot of updates at all and I never had to go through and like revert to an older version of anything. It just worked fine. Startup times are quick enough. I never really noticed that I'm on an SSD so I don't really notice things that are as slow. I will say that it is slower than MX, but that's just simply because one uses Sysviannit, Manjaro uses SystemD and that's always gonna play a role that then the system always is gonna play a role in terms of startup times. So that instability, like I said, it ran perfectly fine. I didn't have any problems at all in terms of things running smoothly other than the K-Win problems, which I talked about earlier. So moving on to community support. Now, I've always had an interesting relationship, if you will, with the Manjaro community. I don't particularly consider them all that friendly. They are very insular in almost everything. They don't really seem to be very welcoming of outsiders. And they're also not very interested in criticism like at all. Like if you critique Manjaro to anybody, you're gonna hear from a lot of the Manjaro people that they just don't enjoy criticism. That's fine. It's a trait of a lot of Linux communities. I'm sure I'm gonna hear quite a bit of that from the people in the comments below. But in terms of actually getting support, it was fine. I went into the Manjaro forums. I didn't use any identity that could have prompted anybody to know who I was. And I asked a few questions. I got answers. I asked a couple silly questions. Some of it was a little kind of sending, but that's just the Linux thing that just happens. It's not much, there's not much you can do about it. You're gonna experience that everywhere. So that's not just a Manjaro thing. But for the most part, community support was fine. The support is not as good as ARCO. It's just not, maybe it's because I'm more familiar with the ARCO developers. Maybe it's because I've been a part of the ARCO community for so long that I really consider it to be top tier. And maybe if I entrenched myself a little bit more in the Manjaro community, I would feel differently. But it just doesn't feel to me as good as the ARCO guys. So take that with a grain of salt, just simply because I'm probably most definitely biased towards ARCO in this situation. So bottom line, Manjaro. It is a good distro. It is a good arch-based distro. Is it the best arch-based distro? That's a hard question to answer, simply because I know that I have that bias towards ARCO. I think that in terms of beginning to end, install and use Manjaro is probably one of the best arch-based distros out there. I think for new users, it is probably better than ARCO. And it hurts me to say that, but ARCO is very complicated. It has a horrendous website that is overly complicated. They have way too many ISOs and they have all those problems in terms of, if you want a lot of the support, you have to go to the YouTube channel of Eric Duvall and he has like 4,000 videos now and it's hard to find stuff. So ARCO has its own complexity that isn't something that you really want when you're introducing a new user to Linux. Now, I don't know whether or not you should give a new user Manjaro or an arch-based distro to begin with, but if you were going to, Manjaro is probably the one that you should give. The delayed updates means that it's gonna be a little bit more stable and you're not going to do as nearly as many updates which would probably be better for new users. They're not gonna freak out every time you have like a gigabyte of new updates to do. Also, it's a very simple install. Like not only do they have like three Isos, I mean, they have more than that, but they have three that's all they're gonna offer you and on the main page. The rest of them you kind of have to hunt for. But also the install itself is just very straightforward. It reminds you of a Windows install. It's four or five steps. You go through it, it's done. You know, it's not that big of a deal. You don't have to go through and choose all your software. You don't have to go through and choose your kernel or your encoding software or any of this stuff. It just, you install it. That's all you do. So in terms of new user acceptability, I don't know if that's really the right word. Manjaro is probably the best one. Now, if you are a long time art space distro user and you don't want to use vanilla arch, but you'd rather have an art space distro, is Manjaro the best one? I personally don't think so. I like the complexity of Arco. I like the complexity of Garuda. I like the added stuff that Endeavor has done, but I haven't gone through and spent a lot of time with Endeavor. That's next. So I like the added complexity that those distros add simply because it feels like it gives me more of that arch-based control that you really get with vanilla arch only in a different way, if that makes sense. With Arco and Garuda and Endeavor, you get control over a lot of stuff where with Manjaro, it feels like a traditional Linux distro where the developers have gone through and basically said, this is what you're going to get. If you want more, you have to install it in the traditional way. You play no role really in building the distro is what I mean. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's the way of doing it. It's the way most new users would want it done, but for experienced users, and particularly in for myself, I enjoy having some control prior to install or immediately after install of, you know, what applications install, maybe what kernel or whatever. Now, it doesn't mean Manjaro doesn't offer tools to do that. They obviously do, but with Arco and Garuda and stuff, that stuff is more in your face, if that makes sense. So for me personally, Manjaro wasn't a favor. It was a good experience. It's not something that if I had to use this and there was no other arch-based distro that I'd be upset about. It's the experience has been perfectly fine. It just doesn't seem special to me simply because I liked Arco so much and I'm biased towards that. So trying to remove that bias has been a constant struggle because I just have missed Arco. So actually trying to pull that away and look at Manjaro for what it is has been a little difficult. I hope that I've done this at least a little bit well in terms of, you know, trying to be at least a little bit objective. So that is it for this video. I'm sure that I could go through and talk about this for a little while longer, but I always try to keep these below a half an hour because these videos are actually quite long to shoot. So if you have comments on Manjaro, you can leave those in the comment section below. I really do appreciate everybody who leaves a comment. I enjoy our conversations down there. So even if you think that Manjaro is awesome and that everybody should use it and nobody should say anything bad against it, you can leave those comments in the comment section below as well. You can follow me on Twitter, at TheLinuxCast, you can support me on Patreon, patreon.com slash linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Today, Devin, Patrick up, Marcus, Megalyn, Jacksime, Toul, Steve A, Tribeca, Linux, Garrett, Mitchell, ArtCenter, CarbonDade, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Martin, E, Merrick, Camp, Joshua, Lee, J-Dogs, Peter A, Crucible, Dark Bandit, Sixth, Vlad A, and Primus. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.