This is the latest version, released last December. I decided to try it, just for fun, and I downloaded the KDE version for something different. I put the live version on a USB 3 stick and gave it a try. It loads and runs unbelievably fast, given the device it's on. Aesthetically, Manjaro provides one of the nicest, if not the nicest, desktop I have ever seen. I'm tempted to install it as a secondary distro, but I have some hesitancy about using an Arch-based distro just because I haven't run one since I axed Arch from my laptop 6 months ago, and it works differently from the Debian-based distros I'm used to. Anyone have experience with Manjaro or a similar alternative like EndeavourOS?
What? No complimentary screenshot? :)
I used Manjaro once but I don't think it was for more than a month or so. They really do put an effort forward to make a beautiful desktop environment. I believe I tried out the Xfce edition. What were the specs of the computer you tested it on?
Quote from: Jason on March 17, 2021, 05:50:28 PM
What were the specs of the computer you tested it on?
My 2019 iMac (3ghz core i5, 8gb RAM, Radeon Pro 570X with 4GB RAM)
Quote from: Jason on March 17, 2021, 05:50:28 PM
What? No complimentary screenshot? :)
Attached. I liked it enough to install it on an external drive. Because it's a rolling release distro, you don't want to install it unless you're willing to download big, regular updates. My first one after installing was 1.6 gb.
Just a quick update on Manjaro. It may not be a Debian-based distro, but it seems pretty easy to use and get packages for if you have a bit of ability to use the command line (mostly to copy and paste commands found on the internet). I use some academically-oriented packages that most people don't use, and was successful in finding and installing every one I looked for. These include Rstudio (statistics), pspp (statistics), mendeley desktop (reference manager), as well as insync (Google Drive assess and sync) and simplenote (stores notes). In all cases, I started out by googling the name of the program and Manjaro. Manjaro installs flatpacks and snaps; a few came to me that way. And you can enable AUR (Arch User Repository) in the GUI software install and update app; AUR has quite a few packages of interest to me.
I put in a forum inquiry on getting the iMac hardware that doesn't work in Ubuntu to work in Manjaro. If I could get these things to work (internal sound, internal mic, internal wifi card), that would be a real incentive to switch. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. The SysAdmin replied that Apple would have to supply the driver and he closed the topic as "irrelevant to Manjaro - Apple hardware is not supported". Nice of him to reply so quickly, but I don't ever remember seeing a statement on any Linux forum stating that the particular distro doesn't supple Apple hardware.
It looks great. And if you can find packages that uncommon it bodes well for others. That's too bad about it not working fully with Apple hardware.
For sure. I didn't expect anything helpful, but I was very disappointed with the response that Manjaro doesn't support Apple hardware. I had previously posted on Ubuntu and Mint forums, and although I didn't get anything workable back from them, neither cut it off by stating that they don't support Apple hardware. Manjaro seems to have nice, helpful forums, too. I'm going to take the response as not official, but from a guy who just doesn't like Apple.
Forgot to mention that PIA was also easy to install on Manjaro.
Quote
Do you mean that the icon is in the tray for easy switching? Because the installer works in the terminal from what I understand. If I'm not mistaken, it's written in Ruby although that may only be the Windows version. So it should install on any distro easily. But some window managers might not support the tray icon. Elementary had this issue in Pantheon.
....
Anyway, in regards to Mac support, I wonder if the Arch community might have more help there. The only thing is you probably don't want to mention that you're using Manjaro. I've heard that some in the forums don't like supporting that as they always emphasize that Majaro isn't Arch (they're not entirely wrong).
Yes, the PIA icon is in the tray for turning on and off, but what I really meant was that it was easy to install. But as you say, it should install easily on any distro. As far as Mac support goes, I have looked at Arch in the past for ideas, but I have never posted there. They have high expectations on their posting and don't suffer newbies easily.
Strange; somehow the last post got attributed to Jason, not me. I only quoted Jason. No biggie.
Small update: I was easily able to install VirtualBox on Manjaro; it was in their repos. I then tried using it to install Haiku OS, which is not a Linux distro, nor BSD. I was able to do it and run it; I posted a screenshot and some comments in the Haiku thread.
I was thinking that you accidentally clicked 'Modify' instead of 'Quote' (or both) and that would then happen because my post before yours isn't there. I checked the logs and they confirmed this. It's something admins and mods can do (modify posts). But I thought I turned off your mod permissions. I'll look into it.
Yes, I suspected that, too. Feel free to turn off my admin status; I don't have any need to modify other people's posts.
Quote from: fox on March 19, 2021, 04:31:09 PM
For sure. I didn't expect anything helpful, but I was very disappointed with the response that Manjaro doesn't support Apple hardware. I had previously posted on Ubuntu and Mint forums, and although I didn't get anything workable back from them, neither cut it off by stating that they don't support Apple hardware. Manjaro seems to have nice, helpful forums, too. I'm going to take the response as not official, but from a guy who just doesn't like Apple.
....
Update. After the Admin closed the topic because of it relating to Apple hardware, the topic got reopened and there were two potentially helpful posts. I'm dealing with them now, and I will be ecstatic is one of them gives me a solution. Whether they work or not, the posts restored my faith in the Manjaro community, which I always thought of as nice, helpful people.
Good to hear. Honestly, any Linux should be thrilled to hear about Mac users trying out Linux, not cut them off as soon as support questions about Apple hardware come up. Not to mention they can learn what works and what doesn't with running Linux on Macs. That's important info.
Unfortunately, none of the suggestions so far resulted in my internal speakers working, but I at least appreciate the attempts to help me.
One of the things I appreciate in Manjaro KDE is Dolphin. I know that Harry prefers this to Gnome Files because of the split option. That's nice, but what I found even more useful is that Dolphin remembers recently accessed files and locations, and that made it easier for me to keep checking the modprobe file that was created and modified as per the sound suggestions. I assume that this is a regular KDE feature and not specific to Manjaro, but this is the first I've noticed it since I don't regularly use KDE.
One of the other things I appreciate about Manjaro KDE are the widgets. I am using the clock, date & time, weather and network speed widgets; much like I used Conky on Crunchbang and Bunsenlabs Linux. However, they have a bug - they don't stay at the position I place them on the desktop following a reboot. That is rather annoying, and I haven't found a fix for it yet.
Incidentally, I am running Manjaro on a Samsung Portable T5 drive plugged into my Thunderbolt port. It is very, very fast; possibly faster than Ubuntu 20.10 running on my internal SSD.
I never noticed that bug with Plasma but it's been a while since I used it. Perhaps it's because it's a rolling release which probably assumes you're using the latest version of Plasma that may not be fully tested. Maybe and update soon will fix it.
I don't think so. I found it reported elsewhere and for other distros. It may have to do with not using the default monitor resolution, which I don't.
Except for that problem, I have to say that I'm really enjoying Manjaro, and I have been using it every day since I installed it (alternating with Ubuntu 20.10). Maybe it's the novelty of using a different distro with a different desktop. One other thing I'm pleasantly surprised about is the relative infrequency of updates. After I first installed it I had a massive update, but since then, nothing. I think this distinguishes it from Arch. I think Manjaro holds back some Arch updates and issues a bunch at a time. I'll have to wait and see.
Quick update. After three weeks, Manjaro continues to run well, with one oddity. Simplenote, which I installed at the outset from the snap store, stopped working. I uninstalled it from the snap store and installed it from AUR (using Add & Remove Software). This version works. Not sure why the original stopped working; perhaps because of an update?
Also, I was able to install FoxitReader (a closed-source free PDF reader with editing functions), available from the Foxit Software website. I use this extensively in Ubuntu when I have to mark up PDFs. The installation instructions are on the Foxit website, and are the same instructions for all Linux distros. Very easy to do.
So after about 3 weeks of use, I have only three minor problems with Manjaro, two of which are specific to my 2019 iMac:
- internal wifi, sound and microphone don't work
- monitor backlight keyboard control doesn't work
- Microsoft Office 2010 apps installed in Crossover work, but the window sizing doesn't
The wifi problem was solved by installing a Powerline adapter. The sound problem was solved with external speakers plugged into a USB sound adapter. The monitor backlight can be easily controlled with a cli program called xbacklight. I have yet to solve the microphone problem. All of these problems occur on Ubuntu as well and are solved more or less the same way.
The MS Office 2010 problem is unique to Manjaro, or at least it doesn't occur in Ubuntu. The programs still work, but only in a small window or in full screen.
Do you mean the backlight for the monitor or keyboard? If the former, that should be accessible via a slider by clicking on your battery power icon. Even Linux Lite lets you do that.
Thanks for bringing up Foxit Reader. I had forgotten about it and was recently trying to edit a PDF with the default one and it wasn't pretty. Weird stuff going on with font size and not able to easily remove text and other fun stuff.
Quote from: Jason on April 03, 2021, 10:07:57 AM
Do you mean the backlight for the monitor or keyboard? If the former, that should be accessible via a slider by clicking on your battery power icon. Even Linux Lite lets you do that.
....
Backlight for the monitor. (I fixed the post to clarify.) Although there is a slider in the Display Configuration setting, moving the slider has no effect on the backlight intensity.
Quote from: fox on April 03, 2021, 04:08:06 PM
Backlight for the monitor. (I fixed the post to clarify.) Although there is a slider in the Display Configuration setting, moving the slider has no effect on the backlight intensity.
Interesting. I wonder why that is. I suppose it doesn't detect the hardware properly but a screen should be pretty easy stuff.
I'm sure it has something to do with the backlight program. The monitor is definitely detected and handled properly. With one exception - modern Apple 27" iMac monitors are 5K, but all Linux and Windows OSes see them as 4K. This is the case on my 2015 and 2019 iMacs.
Quick update. I am still using Manjaro as an alternate to Ubuntu. I boot into it every two or three days and use it for all the same things I use Ubuntu for. (With one exception - my saved local mail is on the Ubuntu partition.) It has been a month now, and it has been problem-free. Updates are not as regular as those in Arch, but when you get them, they are often huge. One this morning was over 1 gb.
I still haven't solved the four problems I have operating it on my 2019 iMac:
- brightness key doesn't work
- no driver for internal Broadcom wifi card (bcm 4364 rev3
- no sound from internal sound card and microphone
- Plasma widgets don't remember their place on the desktop after re-boot
The first three are problems on every distro and I have workarounds for them. I can't generalize about the widget problem because I don't have Plasma on any other distro.
I'm starting to have faith that Manjaro is a reliable distro for everyday use.
DistroWatch just posted a review of Manjaro 21 KDE version here (https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20210426#manjaro). (That's what I have installed after updates.) The review is mostly positive, with a few minor niggles. The comments are interesting. Among the problems reported were issues following updates, which was something I experienced once the last time I tried it many years ago. So far I haven't had this problem.
The other interesting thing that one person reported was a snarky forum comment to a request for assistance. I had the same happen when I first asked for assistance with Mac sound not working. (Later replies were nicer and more helpful.) I think that this is one of the things that can happen with success; you're bound to get a few less sympathetic individuals responding to newbie questions. However, I never noticed this in Ubuntu or Mint forums. I wonder about MX Linux?
I've come into contact with a few Arch users. What I notice that seems common among them, more than most distros is an almost religious zeal about Arch. Like some churches who think they're the only true church, many Arch users see it as the only real Linux. And it's normally advanced Linux users that are interested in and use Arch. I think when you combine those two things you can get a certain level of arrogance. Present company accepted, Codepoet. :)
But, it could also just be that the mods allow people to be snarky (maybe some of the mods are, too) and they can't get away with it in other Forums. The mods often set the tone of a forum.
I ran into my first major hiccup with Manjaro, 4 months after its installation. After booting up this morning, the Update Manager informed me that I needed 1.4 gb of updates. I also received notification that my 5.11 kernel was no longer supported, and I should upgrade to the current supported kernel (5.13). The updates do not include a kernel upgrade; that had to be done separately through the Manjaro Settings Manager. After installing the 5.13 kernel, a reboot took me to a command line when the disk with Manjaro on it couldn't be found during the startup sequence. I rebooted to verify the problem and then rebooted in single user mode, which gave the same result. Fortunately, the older kernel was still installed, and available from the grub menu. Rebooting into the old kernel worked.
I don't remember what borked my Manjaro installation the last time I tried it, but recovery was not so easy. It might be unfair to blame this kind of problem on the rolling release model. I never experienced such a problem on Arch, although I didn't use it much the one time I had it installed. At any rate, I have the perception that rolling release distros are subject to this kind of problem, and that is why I would not use one as my main system. I have never experienced this level of problem in my 10 years of using Ubuntu, and its updates are fresh enough to keep me happy.
Going back to Manjaro, I will post the problem on their forums, and I will also try installing their 5.14.1 experimental kernel to see if the problem has been fixed. They also have a 5.12 kernel in their kernel repository, so I could try that. The other option would be to downgrade to the 5.10 kernel which they mark as "LTS" and "recommended"; so presumably still supported.
Fox, does Manjaro have a Timeshift backup feature, like Mint has?
No, but I'm sure I could install TimeShift on it if I wanted to. That would be a good safety measure if I was relying on it.
Apparently Timeshift is available in the repositories of Manjaro.If you get your system running well, might be worth looking for. Use before updates.
Problem solved, though I'm not sure how, exactly, I solved it. I got three helpful answers on the Manjaro forums, but none of those solved it alone, though one might have contributed to the solution. I'm sure it was a Mac thing. The Manjaro partition is on an external SSD plugged into my Mac's Thunderbolt 3 port with a USB 3.2 cable. I had to shut the computer down, unplug the external, start up the Mac OS, reinstall the Refind bootloader, run Ubuntu on the internal drive, update grub, shut down the computer, plug in the external again, and then Manjaro would boot from the upgraded kernel. I don't even know if all of these steps were necessary, but nothing else I tried worked. One of the suggested solutions from the forums might have been a necessary precursor, just to add yet another possibility.
The TimeShift backup is a good idea, but I'm not going to do it, at least not now. I don't depend on Manjaro, so if I bork it, I bork it. The important thing is that after 4 months, Manjaro continues to work well. I'll keep using it from time to time to see if I should have more faith in rolling releases.
Nice going Fox. :-) You sure do have a complicated computer setup, dual booting a Linux Distro on a Mac, using an external drive. :-)
The external drive was a consequence of the limited space on the internal drive. Its capacity is 500 gb, which might sound like a lot, but I also have the Mac OS on it. Aside from the Mac OS, it houses Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and 21.04. I suppose I don't need both, but I like to keep an LTS fallback just in case one of Ubuntu's 9 month upgrades goes south. When the next LTS comes out in 2022, I can delete one of them, giving me more internal SSD space to play with. Because this Mac has two Thunderbolt ports, I got the idea of putting "tryout" distros on an external drive. When Samsung came out with the T7 series of external SSDs, I bought a 500 gb for distro-hopping and storage of photos and important backup files. The T7 is fantastic when run in a Thunderbolt (or USB 3.2) port. On my Mac it feels every bit as fast as the internal drive.
Unfortunately, things get complicated when you need a bootloader that can properly list MacOS partitions as well as Linux and you also have an external drive. When you update a grub in a Linux partition, the default boot is on that drive. Unplug the drive and things can change. That's what seems to have happened in my case. What I can't figure out, though, is why the older Manjaro kernel would boot but the newer ones wouldn't. Perhaps the bootloader (called Refind), didn't pick up the right code for the newly installed kernel until the external drive was unplugged and replugged.
After I upgraded Xubuntu 20.04 to 20.10, I had a similar problem. You can usually hit ESC to see the boot messages. I saw in the bootup screen the list of messages and it seemed to get stuck on a particular partition. It kept doing the timeout countdown. And then it would but into maintenance mode (or something similar). So I went into fstab and commented out the other partitions. It worked fine after that.
"I suppose I don't need both, but I like to keep an LTS fallback just in case one of Ubuntu's 9 month upgrades goes south."
That's exactly where Timeshift is very useful. I can't use it now unfortunately as I have 3 distros on a 128 GB drive and no external drive big enough.
Quote from: Jason on July 18, 2021, 10:37:29 AM
After I upgraded Xubuntu 20.04 to 20.10, I had a similar problem. You can usually hit ESC to see the boot messages. I saw in the bootup screen the list of messages and it seemed to get stuck on a particular partition. It kept doing the timeout countdown. And then it would but into maintenance mode (or something similar). So I went into fstab and commented out the other partitions. It worked fine after that.
....
Why would other partitions be in your fstab, unless they were for boot or swap?
Quote from: fox on July 18, 2021, 01:45:17 PM
Why would other partitions be in your fstab, unless they were for boot or swap?
I don't know. You saw the part about where I said it happened right after the upgrade, right? I don't know why the upgrade changed that file to automount them. I assume it wasn't initially set up that way or I would have had the error before. They're other distros so they don't need to be available right after boot.
But other partitions/drives you might want to mount right away include /home, a place to do backups, for log files, for server files, etc. You might even want to mount network filesystems. If it's a backup directory and backups start automatically before or after login, you may need to have it ready to go.
The booting issue with Manjaro seems to have resolved itself. The current kernel is 5.15.25-1, and it boots up OK. However, I now think that the problem is/was the thunderbolt 3 connector on the iMac. I'll tell you why. I have two distros on this Samsung T7 external SSD: Manjaro and Linux Mint. Both of these boot up fine if I plug the T7 into a USB 3.0 port. However, when plugged into the thunderbolt 3 port, Mint now won't boot up. I'm wondering if the boot sequence doesn't automatically recognize that port in time to mount the partition.
On another matter, I was just noticing how fast Manjaro is relative to Ubuntu 21.10. Manjaro seems to start up applications noticeably faster. With the updates I've done, Manjaro is now at version 21.2.4. (Manjaro is a rolling release distro.)
That sounds like it. Good sleuthing!
You can check the boot messages to see if you can find when the problem occurs. It's not very friendly but you can look through /var/log/syslog to see if you can find any failures (e.g. do a search for 'fail') and then look at messages before or right after it. You need to be root to do this normally but you could pipe the results to a text file that you can open in an editor and search through.
For example:
sudo cp /var/log/syslog ~
sudo chown $USER:$USER ~/syslog
$USER should be either typed exactly as you see it or enter your username to replace it (i.e. mike:mike). It's the variable representing the user that is logged in.
~ is the home directory of the presently logged-in user
chown, unsurprisingly, changes the ownership of the file to you so you don't need to be root to view it afterward. Make sure that you only do this to the COPY.
Today I updated Manjaro, and following the update it didn't boot. I looked up the error message and found two things to try, but neither revived it. Just to make sure I didn't do anything wrong, I tried updating a backup of Manjaro on another disk. It also updated and then couldn't boot up. You might say that this was a foolhardy thing to do, but since I don't depend on it, I figured why not?
I'm actually satisfied in a strange sort of way. I have alleged all along that rolling release distros cannot be relied upon, and I just proved my point. Too bad in another way though. I had Manjaro going for about two years before this happened, which is a pretty good run (for a rolling release distro, ha ha).
I wouldn't go as far as saying they can't be relied on, maybe not Manjaro, though. I don't think it's usual for most rolling releases to prevent the machine from even booting because of a bad update. But as far as that goes, I've seen Windows updates that caused the system to reboot repeatedly, although not personally.
But rolling releases definitely aren't as reliable as regular releases which themselves aren't as solid as LTS versions (or Debian Stable). How long has it been since you updated Manjaro? The one thing about rolling releases is that I believe you can't leave updating too long or things might break.
In any case, Timeshift would have been able to save a user's bacon if they were using a rolling release distro. I've used it when things have gone south. Not that seriously, but if it did, you can use Linux Mint or another live distro with Timeshift to rollback the, um, rolling release. :)
I don't have a lot of experience with rolling releases, the only other one being Arch. In any case, because I don't trust them, I only use them occasionally, mostly to see how long they would last before they break. That's why I don't use Timeshift or any formal backup mechanism. In this case, I upgraded an external SSD and didn't erase the old one, thus having a Manjaro backup. I had Manjaro about 8 years ago, and that one only lasted for six months before becoming unbootable. This one made it for two years, and Arch before it lasted for two years before I got a new laptop and didn't bother to install it again so in that sense it passed the test. This time, it might have been a month or six weeks since the last time I updated Manjaro. With the rolling release tests, I tried to visit and update them at least once a month.
Compare with Ubuntu and Mint, the distros I have actually used on a daily basis. Neither one has ever become unbootable, through multiple updates and upgrades. My record with Ubuntu is pretty long; I'd say about 15 years. I believe that I have upgraded it continuously without incident, using Ubuntu's upgrade mechanism, since version 7.10. In the case of Mint, I used this as my main distro for about three years around 2015-18 when it was the only distro to boot quickly on my 2014 iMac. I have kept a backup of Mint ever since and have upgraded it up to the current version without incident. Again, I try to visit it monthly since I went back to Ubuntu as my active distro. I would not hesitate to use Mint again as my main distro if I ever have a problem with Ubuntu.
So now I'm trying to decide on whether to keep a rolling release distro to test, and if so, which one. I'll keep an eye on the Manjaro website for a short time to see if a fix emerges and if so, I'll apply it to my broken one. If not, I might try EndeavourOS; also Arch-based and highly rated in Distrowatch.
Quote from: fox on April 07, 2023, 07:16:35 AM.
Compare with Ubuntu and Mint, the distros I have actually used on a daily basis. Neither one has ever become unbootable, through multiple updates and upgrades.j
You clearly aren't trying hard enough! I'm sure you can find a way to make them unbootable if you put in the extra effort!
Quote
So now I'm trying to decide on whether to keep a rolling release distro to test, and if so, which one. I'll keep an eye on the Manjaro website for a short time to see if a fix emerges and if so, I'll apply it to my broken one. If not, I might try EndeavourOS; also Arch-based and highly rated in Distrowatch.
Go with Arch or at least an Arch derivative that doesn't use its own update system as Manjaro does. I have a feeling that's why things get broken in Manjaro because of that. I believe Arch now even has an ISO now that gives a very basic system so you don't have to do everything by hand.
But... if you want easier rolling release distros, take a look at SUSE Tumbleweed or Debian Testing (I believe it's a rolling release, does anybody know)? If you really want some fun, use the unstable version of Debian where every day is possibly a new experience! I know there are other rolling releases besides Arch-derivatives although I can't think of them right now.
Great suggestions, Jason! If I went with an Arch derivative, it would be Endeavour OS; which is basically Arch with an installer, a gussied up desktop and a choice of DE's. Going against it is that the problem I had with Manjaro has been reported in the past on Endeavour as well. (As well as on Arch itself.) OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a good choice for me as well. I have had OpenSUSE Leap as a test distro before and never ran into any problems with it. It's the only RPM distro I've had any experience with. The default DE for OpenSUSE is Plasma, and I like having that on my test distro just to play with it. Debian SID would also be a good choice, as it uses the apt package manager, which I am very familiar with. There are also Sidduction and Nitrux to consider; both based on Debian sid.
They're based on Debian Sid? Wow. That's really cutting-edge. Sid has been described in this way. Imagine if you got up each morning and someone had rearranged all the furniture and some of it might break when you sit on it. That's Debian Unstable (sid). But I guess it's not that different from Arch except that it is the development version which then becomes testing. But you can also mix and match. You can use testing or even stable for the core and then unstable for programs (within reason) so you get the most recent versions.
Endeavour looks pretty good. Barebones but not so barebones that you can't get started with it right away.