Anyone else trying the latest Manjaro?

**MadmanRB** · June 20th, 2013

I have stumbled upon the latest Manjaro with an actual GUI installer so no need for commandline anymore with it for installing the os.
So far I am liking it, this being my first arch based distro I have a lot of learning to do.

**mips** · June 20th, 2013

Welcome

**MadmanRB** · June 21st, 2013

Yeah I am on the Manjaro forums, Manjaro so far is really good.
Though it is more command line centric then I am used to.

**mikodo** · June 21st, 2013

I had it installed up to a month ago. I really like the atmosphere/culture of Arch and the simple install of Manjaro and their packaging. I received a kernel update that month ago and broke the install so I couldn't boot into it. I thought I would just remove it for now rather than trying to find a solution and try it later when it is more mature. I hope it continues to grow legs and gain traction. Glad to her it is still going strong.

;p

**cortman** · June 21st, 2013

I tried Manjaro on my netbook a few weeks ago. Liked it, but was buggy. Also, I always figured if I was going to use Arch, I'd do the real Arch setup.

**tartalo** · June 21st, 2013

I have been trying it too, the general impression is quite good for a distro that hasn't arrived to it's 1.0 release yet.

It's all that Arch avoids to be, Arch will never have a graphic installer, Arch will never make things unnecessarily complicated for advanced users in the name of newbies, Arch is all about choice... and Arch is paradise if you like to have the very latest versions of the programs you use, so no wonder some people try to build a newbie friendly distro on top of Arch, and Manjaro seems to me a very good attempt.

The installer (a Mint installer fork) is really newbie friendly and the hardware detection worked well. The choice of XFCE as default is a good one and they configured it in a very pleasant way to the eye, it was my fist contact with XFCE 4.10 and I really liked how the dock behaves now. As a KDE fan I miss some features, but there is a community edition with KDE as default too, so I can't complain.

The software selection makes sense (Firefox, Libreoffice, VLC...) and has a nice surprise: Steam comes preinstalled! (And it does work)

It has a GUI package manager (pamac, a frontend for pacman) that still needs a lot of work. Pamac is nice and promising but is far from being Synaptic. When it notifies about updates it does nothing if you click in the notification, you have to go to the menu and open pamac. Also, it couldn't handle my first update after installation, but pacman in a terminal worked perfectly. For a newbie friendly distro that's not good enough.

The relationship between Arch and Manjaro devs and users doesn't seem to be as good as it could. Some arguments are pure elitism ("we don't need noobs in Arch!") but some concerns do have a technical basis, Allan McRae (Arch and Pacman dev) criticized the fact that Manjaro delays the packages served by Arch. The thing is that unlike Debian Arch doesn't backport security patches to old versions, it promptly serves the newest upstream versions after testing them, unfortunately sometimes things break, so the Manjaro devs thought that it would be a good idea to sync Arch's stable repository to Manjaro's unstable, and release the packages to Manjaro's stable repository after testing them again, considering that the Manjaro team is much smaller than the Arch team, and that Manjaro doesn't backport either security patches to old versions, that was a bit insulting, and the truth was the many packages that brought security patches were being delayed during weeks for no good reason. Now Manjaro has considerably reduced the testing time. In favour of Manjaro, this short delay does seem to have some positive effects sometimes, for example Manjaro managed to avoid user intervention in the recent migration to /usr/bin, while Arch's approach was to inform about the necessary steps in the distro's front page (Arch users are expected to check the Arch news regularly and are expected to understand what is being said there).

All in all, a very promising distro.