Day 1/2 - My experience so far with Manjaro (coming from Fedora)

[TheProf]

As some of you already saw the other thread, I ended up dual booting Fedora and Manjaro in order to give Manjaro a try. Well, that did not last long, I ended up actually removing Fedora completely as I found myself going back to familiar territory (fedora in this case) when I was trying to fix/understand how Manjaro with KDE worked. This is one way I can force myself to actually sit down and learning something new.

Coming from Fedora, I picked up quite a bit about package managers, DEs, Terminal, troubleshooting, etc.. Fedora, in my eyes is a great distro, very stable and works out of the box with no major issues. As I mentioned before, I do have some minor tweaking to do, but nothing complicated. Gaming worked really well, tried a bunch of different games and I can easily recommend this Distro to someone new even though they say this distro might be for someone with a little more experience in Linux. Personally, Ubuntu and Fedora are the two distros that I would always recommend to a friend if they wanted to get into Linux.

Manajaro, what can I say! I always wanted to work on Arch based distro, more specifically a rolling release distro. I opted for Manjaro because I didn't feel like setting up Arch from scratch, although I think at some point I will make the switch,I really want to try it out and see.

How has my experience been so far? Well, its only been around 15 hours that I've spent playing around with Manjaro. Strange thing is, I could not install the gnome version of Manjaro on my machine, I guess I can do it manually within the KDE Plasma install. However, I decided not to do that, and I will stay on KDE Plasma for now. I like the fact that there are a lot of customization, and I just want to see if I will really use it or just leave it, at the end of the day, in order for me to give a valid opinion, I need to use it.

Here are a couple of things that I really like about Manjaro and the reason why I decided to try out this distro.

1. I like the idea around having the latest and greatest version of software. This is not the unstable release of Manajaro, but still, the idea is to experience what it is like working with a rolling release
2. KDE Plasma - Yes, I said I wasn't a big fan, but the more I use it, the more I see that there are a lot of interesting customization options and for someone like myself who likes to play around with different settings, this is kind of interesting.. I still prefer gnome 40 for the moment, but I can definitely work with KDE, now that I have it running the way I want it.
3. The AUR, I guess this is a big one, one of the reasons a lot of probably use Arch or Arch based distros.
4. I like the idea of a distro based on Arch but without the hassle of having to build out your own distro, everything is setup out of the box with no issues. All my hardware was recognized from the get go.
5. Gaming - with the latest and greatest software, I hope it will bring additional improvements
6. Learning pacman and pamac

That's about it for now, I will report back in a few days as I continue to use it more. Right now, I only have Manjaro 21.1,0 KDE Plasma edition deployed on my workstation so no dual booting

 

[captain-sensible]

Looks good to me

I see they have a great user guide as well : https://manjaro.org/support/userguide/


regarding 3)

My understanding is that packages that are maintained on the AUR are done with the maintainers having at the back of there minds that some dependencies will come from the Arch main repo's

Manjaro does not directly access Arch repo ; instead it has its own core repositories.

I think this means (i'm sure some who knows better will correct me) that some packges from the Arch AUR will work for Manjaro , but that for some, due to differences in core between Arch and manjaro some may not work or when Manjaro updates some might stop working .

I don't think thats going to be a major problem though. With any Distro based on another there will always be some minor quirks

 

[f33dm3bits]

Next distribution for you to try if you want to be closer to vanilla Arch is EndeavourOS. Also 3 tips when using the AUR, the last one is a personal preference.
1. Try to use PKGBUILDS with high popularity and votes.
2. Always read the PKGBUILD before installing.
3. Don't use an AUR helper that acts as a pacman wrapper but instead use an AUR helper that allows you to search and build packages, so that you then can install the packages using pacman. The one I use and would recommend is aurutils, it also allows you to build packages in a clean chroot.

 

[captain-sensible]

I only have a few from AUR and decided I would just install them using the PKBUILD file manually ; once installed i don't do anything with them via yay or other helper ;when i want to update them i just cd into the dir and run

git pull

either i get feedback of "everything up to date" or i can then run makepkg on updated

let us know when you want to try and install from the AUR maybe first one something simple ?

 

[f33dm3bits]

I only have a few from AUR and decided I would just install them using the PKBUILD file manually ; once installed i don't do anything with them via yay or other helper ;when i want to update them i just cd into the dir and run

git pull

either i get feedback of "everything up to date" or i can then run makepkg on updated

let us know when you want to try and install from the AUR maybe first one something simple ?

I used to do that and even wrote a small script for doing that, however after 10 packages it being more efficient using an AUR helper. I am currently using 23 packages from PKGBUILDS. Also with aurutils I can build my packages in a clean chroot(using the -c, --chroot option) so that not all the extra packages needed for building are installed on my system.

aur sync -c  package-name

    -c, --chroot
              Build packages in a systemd-nspawn container.  (aur build -c)

You can do that manually as well but with aurutils it is done for you just by running the correct flag with your sync command.

 

[TheProf]

Small update. I've managed to get KDE Plasma working really smooth like gnome 40. The trick was to play with the compositor both in KDE Plasma settings and the nvidia-settings app. Everything now is much smoother even with animations.

I also tested some more gaming, seems like most games work well with very little to no stuttering except for FF14 where it stutters like crazy for some reason. Need to work more on this to figure out why.

For those who are new, changing the scale method to smooth and rendering backend to openGL 3.1 worked really well.

 

[captain-sensible]

have you installed Timeshift yet ?

 

[TheProf]

have you installed Timeshift yet ?

Technical I didnt install it, but it comes preinstalled with the Manjaro install

 

[captain-sensible]

Thats handy !

 

[dcbrown73]

For those with ample Manjaro experience. I've read on more than one occasion that sometimes updates to Manjaro fail to the point that a reinstall is required.

Does Manjaro have update stability issues?

 

[TheProf]

From what I’ve seen, it seems to depend on the version of Manjaro you’re using. I am using the stable release, so technical it should be the most stable release compared to other Manjaro releases.

But I am definitely curious myself as this is one of the reasons I went with Manjaro, I wanted to see how stable a rolling release would be.

So far, no issues.

 

[TheProf]

Another interesting configuration issue I had with dual monitors and KDE Plasma. Windows would not open on the primary monitor, instead would always go to the secondary monitor.

I used xrandr to see if I can spot anything, like maybe my primary monitor is connected on the wrong display port, but it seems good. I finally figured out that there's an option in KDE Plasma settings that fixes this. What's important is to ensure the monitor is set to primary where you want the window to open and then go to Settings -> Window Management -> Window Behavior -> Advanced and uncheck Allow Apps to remember the position of their own windows, if they support it

 

[TheProf]

Next distribution for you to try if you want to be closer to vanilla Arch is EndeavourOS. Also 3 tips when using the AUR, the last one is a personal preference.
1. Try to use PKGBUILDS with high popularity and votes.
2. Always read the PKGBUILD before installing.
3. Don't use an AUR helper that acts as a pacman wrapper but instead use an AUR helper that allows you to search and build packages, so that you then can install the packages using pacman. The one I use and would recommend is aurutils, it also allows you to build packages in a clean chroot.

I noticed that in Manjaro, you can use pamac (comes with Manjaro) to perform installs, searches, updates to AUR packages. Should I still look at aurutils? Is it a better option?

 

[gvisoc]

I found yay to be a really good wrapper on top of both pacman and AUR (commandline). But I prefer to download my own PKGBBUILD files from the provider, with very few exeptions (e.g.: Minecraft Launcher)

 

[f33dm3bits]

I noticed that in Manjaro, you can use pamac (comes with Manjaro) to perform installs, searches, updates to AUR packages. Should I still look at aurutils? Is it a better option?

You can use pamac if Manjaro provides that and you are happy with it, if not you can look at aurutils or another AUR helper.

 

[captain-sensible]

if you want to try aurutils ; the way i got it is :

shell window

cd ~

go to : https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/aurutils

click where it says git clone

and paste behind git clone

i.e

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/aurutils.git

cd aurutils

makepkg -s

//that should after clicking yes make : aurutils-3.1.2-2-any.pkg.tar.zst
then:

sudo pacman -U aurutils-3.1.2-2-any.pkg.tar.zst

//that should install it and away you go or maybe not quite :

i got Optional dependencies for aurutils
bash-completion: bash completion
zsh: zsh completion [installed]
devtools: aur-chroot
vifm: default pager

Glad you posted f33dm3bits otherwise i would be scratching my head why this is not working :

[andrew@darkstar:~]$ aurutils --help (08-24 14:56)
zsh: command not found: aurutils

so its : aur <flag>

but still no --help

 

[f33dm3bits]

Glad you posted f33dm3bits otherwise i would be scratching my head why this is not working :

[andrew@darkstar:~]$ aurutils --help (08-24 14:56)
zsh: command not found: aurutils

so its : aur <flag>

but still no --help

It doesn't have a help flag but does have a man page that lists all the commands.

man aur

aur is the main command and then it has all these sub commands which are listed in the main man page. It's listed as aur-subcommand. So searching the AUR you would do like this.

aur search timeshift

If you want to install it you would do.

aur sync timeshift

If you want to build the package in a chroot then you do this.

aur sync -c timeshift

Be sure tho check the man page for sync.

man aur sync

 

[captain-sensible]

will experiment thanks also :

$ info aur

looks informative

 

[TheProf]

Thanks guys, I will give the aurutils a try, curious to see how it works, learning something new every day.

 

[f33dm3bits]

will experiment thanks also :

$ info aur

looks informative

That's the same info as the man page