Manjaro 0.8.2

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claudecat

Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by claudecat »

I just installed this distro after having played with several of the previous versions in various forms, and I'm quite impressed. For those unfamiliar with it, it's an Arch/Xfce based distro (other DEs are available) with an emphasis on ease of use and install, with some nice tools for handling gpu drivers and kernel upgrades. It comes with nvidia's proprietary drivers (and maybe amd's - I haven't tried it yet on my amd gpu laptop) right on the iso and usable as a choice on the livecd boot menu. The Xfce implementation is pretty great, with nice theming and useful things like Thunar as root available via context menus. Also great is that there are NO updates available upon installing (as of today of course) - something which irked me greatly when Mint KDE came out and required several hundred mb of updates the day it was released.

As noted, it's Arch based, but it has its own repos which aim for greater stability than raw Arch. Unlike Arch itself, there are gui tools for package management and updates. I haven't tested them as I quite like plain old pacman and have gotten familiar with it through using Arch and Chakra for years, but I'd imagine that they are decent based on how well everything else seems to work. Installation is fairly easy, though not as newcomer friendly as 'buntu - certainly the easiest of the Arch spin-offs aside from perhaps Chakra (Chakra's installer is certainly prettier).

Worth mentioning also is that packages from the AUR (Arch User Repository) are compatible with Manjaro, and yaourt (a nice tool for managing them) is available directly from the regular repos unlike Arch. Once that's installed, you can easily install yaourt-gui, which makes it even easier to search and install things not in the Manjaro repos.

Manjaro seems to be to Arch what Mint is to Ubuntu in some ways - easier, more polished and less buggy than the parent (not that Arch itself is bad, just hard to install - I thinks it's worlds better than Ubuntu). I highly recommend this distro for anyone that likes Xfce or maybe has always wanted to try an Arch-like distro without the painful install process. I had a really nice Xfce setup with compiz and emerald enabled and working (yes, even emerald-themes is available!) within minutes of completing the install. And no, I have nothing to do with the distro aside from using it :)
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Fandangio

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by Fandangio »

I am currently running this in a VM and I must say that I am mightily impressed. I've tried both the KDE and main (XFCE) editions and both are great. As a KDE fan I must admit that there is much more polish in the main release including a nice Conky.

Pacman is super easy to use, so much so that I have not tried the GUI based installers either.

I came across this distro when downloading ArchBang for installation on a live USB (which I am currently running as I type this) though I had seen it before but not given it much attention. I must say I am seriously considering installing it on my main PC.

Manjaro is pretty awesome!
The Dark Side

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by The Dark Side »

I am currently testing Manjaro 0.8.2 (KDE and XFCE editions). They have excellent performance, has left me really surprised. Anyway no change to Linux Mint for anything so far. Greetings.
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ashtonford
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Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by ashtonford »

it looks nice but it has alot of bugs if you try to install it. The disk utility to set up the partitions is next to useless and it failed to install the bootloader after multible tries. I hope the finished product when it comes out is better, it looks nice.
Fandangio

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by Fandangio »

I finally did an install on a spare PC (Acer Aspire) and it went flawlessly. The issues mentioned previously were not encountered so maybe there are some specific HW config issues.
claudecat

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by claudecat »

I too have encountered no issues when installing it to actual hardware - on both my nvidia gpu desktop and an aging netbook with intel gpu. I should add that I always partition my drive(s) prior to install of any distro, and I NEVER let grub touch the mbr - rather, I let it install to the root of the install partition. I have an insane number of installed distros and hence a very carefully crafted menu.lst (yes, I prefer legacy grub - specifically that installed by openSUSE as it's patched to include support for gpt among other things).

I've really put Manjaro through its paces, installing various DEs and WMs and testing them. Only gnome proved problematic (won't load at all) but I've had that issue on Arch as well. Never bothered to research it as I despise gnome-shell more than any other DE. Manjaro seems best with xfce, but KDE and LXDE work quite nicely as well. Haven't experienced a single application crash. This is a distro with a bright future.
The Dark Side

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by The Dark Side »

I tested Manjaro 0.8.2 with KDE (always my favorite), XFCE, and Cinnamon/Gnome3, and none gave me problems. If it is true that XFCE and Cinnamon/Gnome3 versions are a little more cared than the KDE version (which is not settled anything with a few clicks). Undoubtedly, this distribution has great potential and long bright future ahead. Best regards.-

News flash: He's out Manjaro 0.8.2 with LXDE desktop. I have not downloaded yet, but it really has painted blossom. Would also be great if Linux Mint again have a version with LXDE.-
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ashtonford
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Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by ashtonford »

claudecat wrote:I too have encountered no issues when installing it to actual hardware - on both my nvidia gpu desktop and an aging netbook with intel gpu. I should add that I always partition my drive(s) prior to install of any distro, and I NEVER let grub touch the mbr - rather, I let it install to the root of the install partition. I have an insane number of installed distros and hence a very carefully crafted menu.lst (yes, I prefer legacy grub - specifically that installed by openSUSE as it's patched to include support for gpt among other things).

I've really put Manjaro through its paces, installing various DEs and WMs and testing them. Only gnome proved problematic (won't load at all) but I've had that issue on Arch as well. Never bothered to research it as I despise gnome-shell more than any other DE. Manjaro seems best with xfce, but KDE and LXDE work quite nicely as well. Haven't experienced a single application crash. This is a distro with a bright future.
Like I said before a nice distro needs a better install gui if its going to target new users as well as being adobted by a large user base. Any way I was trying to do a Install with a usb thumb drive so maybe that was part of the problem. Also does this this distro require any settings with scaling etc to be adjusted like other arch distros installed on laptops?
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ashtonford
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Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by ashtonford »

its a decent distro the cinnamon verson is lacking some key settings that make things better like the never setting on the screen saver and the hibernation setting in the power options when closing the lap top. It the little things that make linux mint tops they alway have these mentioned options there and polished
claudecat

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by claudecat »

I'd recommend Manjaro only in its default xfce form, as that's where the developers are focusing their effort. I too have found some minor oddities with other desktops that might be troublesome for newcomers. Let's keep in mind that this is a very young project. As such, I am highly impressed with the level of polish and usability in the main version. If they are able to make the installer less "Archy" (maybe by forking Chakra's Tribe installer - Manjaro's lead developer is a Chakra refugee), they could well be a distro that may see explosive growth in the coming years.
usbtux

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by usbtux »

claudecat wrote: If they are able to make the installer less "Archy" (maybe by forking Chakra's Tribe installer - Manjaro's lead developer is a Chakra refugee), they could well be a distro that may see explosive growth in the coming years.
Have to agree about the installer, unless you want to take over the whole disk; newbies would struggle. - Mine runs from an external harddisk.
Adelante

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by Adelante »

As it happened, just when Manjaro came out, I was thinking of wiping my hard drive to do a new partition scheme and fresh installs of the systems I use, as I do every now and then. I took the opportunity of using the automatic installation method of Manjaro to check it out, which meant letting it take the whole drive. That was, of course, easy to do. I spent about a week with it (Xfce) and figured out the way to go along pretty well. It's a very nice distro and I was enjoying using it. I could see I would learn a lot from it. In the end, I made a partition for Manjaro along with the rest, but I couldn't get the installation to partition together at all. They went to a lot of trouble with the how-to-install guide for newbies, but it still stumped me. One day somebody will come up with an easy GUI for people like me. Everything worked very well in the time I did get to use it. They did a nice job there.
Monsta
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Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by Monsta »

Out of curiosity, I've installed this distro (XFCE edition) in my Virtualbox. I've never dealt with Arch before, so I've just tried to look around and see how the things are done there :)

Well...

+ It's boots and shuts down very fast.
+ Its package manager, pacman, seems to be faster than dpkg/apt-*/aptitude tools.
+ The first big update I've performed right after installing didn't break anything. :lol:
- Both GUIs for pacman (PkgBrowser and Pacman-GUI) seem to be less convenient than Synaptic.
- Couldn't find any update notification utility yet.
- There's a weird mix of pre-installed software. GTK3-based Simple Scan, Gedit, File Roller, Deadbeef, Catfish; Qt-based SMPlayer, PkgBrowser, HP Device Manager (wait, what? :shock:); and a lot of GTK2-based programs (which is normal for XFCE, of course).

Overall, it looks like a nice distro which has potential. I think I'll keep an eye on it to see how often updates are pushed to the Stable repo, do they always come in large packs or there may be smaller updates (e.g. security updates or quick bugfixes), and so on.
addegsson

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by addegsson »

Manjaro is awesome!
Fandangio

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by Fandangio »

I was asking in their forums about installing but keeping an existing "home" partition and was pointed to a wiki article that I had missed. As some have said here installation is not that easy (unless using a whole drive) but there is something special coming in 0.9 to remedy this.

One of the mod's had the following comment;
Anyway, the GUI installer will be something quite special. It has a particularly unique feature that has not been mentioned publically yet. I can't tell you either. But, believe me, it is both unique and amazing to the point that the 0.9 release will make all the previous versions look like something from the stone age.
Due in January :)
Adelante

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by Adelante »

Thanks, Fandangio. I look forward to that.
Monsta
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Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by Monsta »

Well, I've found the update notifier at last, it's called kalu. It's not their own utility, it's just patched to work not only with Arch but with Manjaro too. And so... it can even display the news from the official Manjaro's blog! (Wouldn't that be a useful feature in mintUpdate, especially for LMDE? 8))
Monsta
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Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by Monsta »

Manjaro 0.8.3 is here. Gnome 3 edition was kicked out (you can still install Gnome from the repos of course), MATE edition was welcomed in. :)
I wonder how often they will add/remove desktops in the future... that could confuse the users :)
The Dark Side

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by The Dark Side »

Without a doubt Manjaro is a distribution that comes with everything. They work really infernal rhythm, to the point that it is not long between one version and another. Version 0.8.3 is out (until a short time ago was out version 0.8.2). I think the Gnome 3 output of this issue was that they had some problems with the new version of Gnome 3, I imagine that the next release will be a version with Gnome 3 (Gnome 3 not to have gross errors).

I think they have an excellent news MATE included as a new version. Even from the little I saw on their forums, they're talking about to release a version with E17. Awesome!! I do not know if the next version will be 0.8.4 or 0.9, but no doubt that Manjaro will make history in the Linux universe.-
Fandangio

Re: Manjaro 0.8.2

Post by Fandangio »

Jose Manuel wrote:I think they have an excellent news MATE included as a new version. Even from the little I saw on their forums, they're talking about to release a version with E17. Awesome!! I do not know if the next version will be 0.8.4 or 0.9, but no doubt that Manjaro will make history in the Linux universe.-
I was told that 0.9 would be avaliable within the first couple of months (maybe as a RC) of 2013 so I doubt if they could squeeze in 0.8.4 inbetween.

0.9 is said to come with some major improvements :)
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