Manjaro - It's Arch Jim, But Not As We Know It

hello and welcome to the OTB channel over the last six months I've lost count of the amount of times that have been asked to do a review with Manjaro Linux so it's high time we looked at the distribution so let's go to the intro and then we'll spin it up and see what we think okay welcome back and so as you all know my preference for distros are Debian Debian stable and arch and I swap and change between them constantly they both got strengths and weaknesses Debian is incredibly stable and I appreciate it as a workhorse the downside of course is that many of the packages are quite old but I sort of get over that by installing flat packs of the likes of OBS studio and kdenlive and it seems to be a decent compromise arch on the other hand is bleeding edge and it has some real strengths I like the pac-man package manager' I think it's very fast and it's effective and I like the aur but because it's bleeding edge sometimes the packages can break although they tend to be fixed quite quickly and I swap and change between the two for the last couple of months I've probably been 80% Debian but I was 80% are CH before that so I like both and the reason I tend to stick with Debian and arch is because I like to stay quite close to the source it's not that I've got anything against variants of Debian or arch based systems not by any stretch of the imagination it's just that I like to customize a system to suit myself that said there are some excellent variations on a theme out there as many of you know I'm Jill booting peppermint Linux and mint Linux on my little ThinkPad at the moment and I've been spending a lot of time away from home staying in hotels and I've got to say that I'm pretty impressed with both so talking about variations on a theme we come to Manjaro it's an incredibly popular distribution claims to be very very user friendly so it's appropriate for perhaps new users to Linux but also experienced users and it's been riding high in their distro what's watch charts for a number of years now I've never really used it so the only one time that I downloaded it and installed it was when I was testing out i3 and I knew that Manjaro did a particularly well developed version of i3 and I was impressed with it but I never really looked at Manjaro the distro itself it was more about a3 the window manager that I was investigating and what I found out about that are though I think it's a greater tiling window manager tiling window managers aren't really the thing for me but that still leaves moong Manjaro what do we think about it well let's go to the split screen so let's start by just having a quick look at a distro watch and you can see at the moment Manjaro is riding high at number 2 these are page hits on the DistroWatch page so they're not really well not at all an indication of popularity as search but just what people have been clicking on on DistroWatch but it's been pretty high up for a while so why is it well let's have a look at Manjaro zou own wiki and the statement that has kind of inspired the title of of this video its arch Jim but not as we know it is Manjaro zone statement that it's a different kind of beast so what makes it different well its arch based an arch compatible but it's not arch as such far from being just an easy to install or pre-configured version of arch Manjaro is actually a very different kind of beat beast apparently in fact the differences between Manjaro and Archer far greater than the differences between popular abun to distributions and its many derivatives apparently it's developed independently from arch and by a completely different team it's designed to be accessible to newcomers while arch is aimed at experienced users ok it draws software from its own independent repositories and that's important and it contains software packages that are not provided by arch and it provides its own distribution specific tools such as its hardware detection utility and a settings manager ok so it's not just about theming that's the important thing it's made significant changes and moves away moved away from a standard arch distribution and it uses three different types of repositories there's unstable which is just a day or two behind arch there's testing a week or so behind arch and then the stable usually about two weeks behind arch apparently that's the default stable and Manjaro aims to provide updates and downloads to that repository and if the developers feel that a particular package within arch stable needs to be patched well they'll do it so user-friendly tools and fast powerful always up to date still cutting-edge but holding back arches bleeding edge nature for a week or two just to make sure things work as they should okay so that makes sense to me it's different enough to give it a spin it's not just about theming so what about the distro itself well recently Manjaro took the step of becoming a corporate entity is that the right word setting up as a business and one of the reasons that they did this was to make sure that they could take on full-time employees and maintainer x' which i think is a great idea I love the idea of people sitting in a bedroom and contributing to a particular distribution you know and doing it all for free but if you really want to push a distro forward it does help if you can have people working for you full time they also transfer donation funds to a nonprofit organization and they're looking obviously for commercial support as well I don't have a problem with developers getting paid and I can understand why Mann Jaros taken this step let's face it a bun too has canonical behind it so it's really not much different to that in my view that said they have done a few things which were shall we say not taken that well by the general Linux community one of those was incorporating a commercial program into the Installer free office as opposed - LibreOffice and there was something of an uproar which I watched with interest Manjaro responded though pretty quickly to the community uproar and they've made changes now that I believe allows you to install free office all Libre Office so the choice is still yours fair enough you know that they responded quickly to what the community saw was a bad thing and they've given people the choice so let's switch back to the main camp they're obviously very serious in in pushing Manjaro and developing it and I like the fact that they've got full time developers on their team I think that certainly helps although I think Debian still works on the basis of 100% volunteers and that's been around for so long that that works as well so whichever way you choose it's all good as far as I'm concerned but there's enough that seems to set Manjaro apart from standard Arch that it's certainly worth a look so let's go and have a look in VirtualBox I've downloaded the xfce edition which is the addition that the Manjaro website offers as the first option and we'll see what it has to offer I should say before going any further that you can download Manjaro in a whole variety of formats with different desktop environments and window managers some of them are the official variants some of them are the community community variants so whatever your personal preferences you will probably find the one that fits you just very quickly looking at man Jaros downloads page xfce is there as the first choice but you can also download plasma or you can download gnome or architect which is an interesting idea it's a text installer I believe but you can build manda djaro however you wants you also have the option here to use some of their community additions and here we have budgie cinnamon I three marte open box okay so there's plenty of choice but enough with that let's get on and let's look at the distro so you should see in front of you now my copy of VirtualBox I've got Manjaro set up there with a 32 gig virtual hard drive video memory ok it's only 60 mega of RAM I've got 8 gig of ram setup and - cause of my i5 CPU I've also set it up in EFI mode so let's see how well it copes especially with virtual boxes less-than-perfect efi compatibility and we'll hit start and see what happens and as normal VirtualBox starts up on the wrong page now looking at the boot screen I really quite like this you've got options you can set before you even boot so I would like to setup Europe and let's look for London there we go so that's my timezone what do I want to set up for my keyboard well I want to set up GB or UK key table GB ok language English and GB great and let's boot it Oh hold on I've missed an option there drivers do we just want free drivers or do we want numb free as well let's set up non free to give it every opportunity to boot and here we go the normal time lag that you get with VirtualBox and we may well come back in a second though having said that it's booted up pretty quickly so all good it seems to be going through the stages well we finally got there it seemed to hang on a black screen for an awful long time to the extent that I thought maybe this won't that boot in efi mode and I started to think that maybe the ISO worse perhaps corrupted so I read downloaded the ISO booted again still black screen for five minutes plus I tried booting in BIOS mode again black screen for five minutes plus so I changed back to efi and i thought just be patient steve and sure enough eventually it did boot so I don't know whether this is something to do with man gyros Hardware detection scripts running that kind of slow the process down a little bit in VirtualBox but anyway if you try it in VirtualBox and it seems to hang the answer seems to just be patient so you can see you can see the live DVD is now booted it's not in full-screen mode well it is in full-screen mode but it's not a maximum resolution but that doesn't really matter for the installation so we've booted in and we're immediately greeted by a welcome screen which is quite nice and that can go fullscreen as well if we drag it to the left um I'm not so sure that the wallpaper is to my tastes but it's quite a clean layout and I'm a big fan of these welcome screens which will look out later but let's just get it installed for now so let's launch the Installer and see what happens welcome to Manjaro linux 18 point 1.5 jaw Zhu Raya installer okay I have presumed this is kalamarez and urea is what they're actually calling the latest version of Manjaro I see it's already selected British English and assume that's because I was allowed to set the options at the beginning so let's click Next and see what happens it's correct selected the correct time zone which is brilliance it selected the correct keyboard which is brilliant it spotted that it's in EFI mode so let's just do an arrays disk let it partition the whole disk for EFI and I see it's creating a 300 Meg fat32 partition no swap again but it's we see keep seeing that on the latest installers not that you need a swapper for VirtualBox and 31.7 gig EXT for root partition ok let's say next and let's enter our login name so ot be as normal and I'm just entering the password now use the same password for the admin account I think so let's click Next right so now we get the option do we want Manjaro with no office suites or do we want Libre Office or do we want free office do you know I'm just gonna stick with Libre Office for now and we'll click Next it's giving me a summary of what it's done which all looks good so let me hit install do you really want to do this yes I do please install now Oh the Installer failed to create a partition on the disk ata VBox hard disk hmm that's interesting let's let's try this again launch Installer let's go to next next next let's do manual partitioning and see if we have better luck with that let's create a new partition with the mount point root okay let's see if we need to create a mount point for our ESP let's go to boot efi and let's see if we can do it this time okay fingers crossed everyone LibreOffice next install stall now plays okay that seems to have done it hmm okay we'll come back when it's finished doing what it needs to do so here we are I shut down the live image of Manjaro I removed the ISO which hadn't automatically been removed i rebooted I got for a brief second an error message that said that could not boot from CD stroke DVD okay but it immediately kind of rebooted VirtualBox and the next time it booted up fine I did a full system update because it wouldn't go to full screen initially and after the full system update well not a problem I can go to full screen here if I just click on this and we have 1920 by 1080 so all good in fact let's just check that in the settings so display 1920 by 1080 so I didn't have to mess about with the VirtualBox guest additions ISO at all so here we are a nice looking very clean layout and I do like these welcome screens that come up I didn't to start off with but I think they're quite useful let's just run through this so there's a readme that talks about just general things getting help looking in the forums the IRC etc etc what else a direct link to the forums and to get involved release info Manjaro 19 apparently now that I've ever fully upgraded it to a chatroom what happens if I go there interesting okay so it takes us straight to the man Jaros chatroom let's close that development ok straight to a git lab page the wiki which i think is probably gonna be the most useful for new users which talks about well it looks to be a fairly well maintained wiki with an overview how to use how to download how to set it up in bias or UEFI konkey repositories pac-man etc etc okay so a good starting point then we have mailing lists and an option to donates what about applications what's that all about so Manjaro hello web browsers so at the moment we have Firefox installed let's try to install something else let's try to go for chromium update the system optional dependencies for chromium I don't think so let me put in my password and I'm assuming it's now going to install let me here apply download of snappy does that mean it's using snaps I don't know well have a look after to see if snap D is installed so I actually quite like the fact that it gives you the option to just have a look at what what applications you've got installed right from the get-go and I'm assuming chromium is now installed yes it is this is quite nice email office suites you've got the full option there MS Office online okay so that gives you a set of links I assume to online Microsoft Office office apps ABI word and gönül Merrick and now I can't think how to say that but you know what I mean ebooks text editors printing Manjaro printing right okay I'm going to click YES on that and we'll see if I can actually print so what do we want there I don't want any scanning application at the moment that's just install it and see what happens so it's going to basically install a whole range of different things to reinstall chromium strange okay checking into conflicts and downloading right while it's doing that let's just have a quick look around the system so from what I can see it's a straightforward xfce desktop some quite nice wallpaper and it's got the whisker menu pre-installed and set up ready to go I can't say I'm a huge fan of the wallpaper but that's just a personal preference okay transaction successfully installed great but I do quite like the feel of it it just feels very clean whole folder yeah and I'm a bit of a fan of the icon set and it's almost a dark theme which is which is quite nice so let's have a look through here so accessories so what have we got catfish file search in grumper archive manager calculator hewlett-packard device manager light DM gtk+ greeter settings ok install from the way go Manjaro application utility what's that oh it's what we've just been looking at from the welcome screen so we can access it separately as well Manjaro user guide documentation for beginners a hundred and thirty eight pages apparently oh oh I see and right well um I've got to say let's just fullscreen this I am always a fan of any sort of written documentation that comes with a distro yeah that's great it's like a manual for use so quite impressed at that so great marks for Manjaro there you've got mousepad installed a menu editor ROG which i think is the calendar application a screen shot application software tokens I assume there's something to do with a VPN but I'm not sure to start to be honest a sense of viewer okay I'm on VirtualBox here so I wouldn't necessarily expect to see anything so that's fine where was I accessories foon our file manager at us manager and XF burn okay decent selection education well we've got LibreOffice math games a half so for the gamers amongst you we have steam installed by default graphics G color - and the excellent some distributions aren't installing the by by default these days which i think is wrong because it's one of the flagships of linux as far as I'm concerned at the moment on Internet pssh browser and VNC browser chromium which have just installed Firefox hex chat pidgin - people still use pidgin I haven't used it for years but nevertheless and you've got funder bird as well which is great what about multimedia you have audacious pulseaudio the video for liner linux test utility ok the video capture utility that's quite nice XF burn and VLC we've already seen from the word go I chose to install Libre Office and it's also installed queue PDF view what's another HP scanning utility and then we have of course all of our settings and a system option where we can access the Manjaro hello screen should we want to so so far so good let's go to the settings manager and see what's there I'll fullscreen this so is this xfce or is this Manjaro settings I'm not entirely sure but we seem to have all the standard stuff appearance so what style do we want icons I saw so it's papyrus mayor that it's installed by default what fonts do we want what settings ok nice and straightforward let's just click that elf is this the settings utility I'm just trying to the Manjaro settings yeah utility I'm not entirely sure but anyway desktop wallpaper for my desktop let's see what they've got it quite a new nice selection by the look of it in fact maybe I'll just click through some of these oh that's very purple what about that windows like but quite nice a plain ish Manjaro desktop nice black-and-white photograph ha little dog cartoon Doug and one of these crabs in ER a turtle or a Tara Pynchon I say quite nice seem to be very custom based wallpapers quite like that that's very colorful okay so we're bottom line is we have lots of different wallpapers to choose from I'm just going to settle with that one for the time being window manager tweaks okay so the standard stuff they're really set workspaces etc you display manager which we've already looked at your power manager okay session and startup software updates a mime type editor and of course a light DM settings manager so let's launch the software updates and I think this is actually per Mac in fact I believe the Manjaro developers were the people who created per Mac there shouldn't actually be any updates here because well I updated it in just before showing you it to make sure that VirtualBox was working properly it's taken a little while to go through everything though but let me just see if I can while we're doing this go into about yes it's per mac so now I've sort of followed a method we're always installed per mark on my arch systems because I found it a really useful utility for searching for packages but I haven't actually used it for updating because I found sometimes it just doesn't work but as Manjaro developers have actually done this and created the tool I'm assuming that it works pretty well on this I'm just going to go into preferences and see what it's got there so official repositories use mirrors from etc etc a you are so it's got a you are support updated already snap support is updated okay so presumably if I search for snap D snap D is indeed already installed what about flat packs flat pack is already installed as well so it looks like you can pretty much use whatever you like here flat packs or snaps I'm guessing I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that the little application utility is snaps it just gives you a little bit more choice what are we go over here restore the minimize all open windows and show the desktop okay so let's just create a couple of windows and if I hit that yet it just literally minimizes them so that's fine what have we got here we've got our workspaces two seem to be set up by default and here we have kernel options so let's have a look at the kernels that we've got installed so it's running kernel 5.4 18-1 running and installed we have a few other options there a real-time kernel and not an LTS kernel by the look oh no no I'm wrong there's an LTX kernel so if I wanted to install the LTS kernel I'm just gonna follow along I quite like the fact that there's a separate kernel utility to be honest because the naming of kernels isn't always completely obvious if if you're not used to that sort of thing anyway we'll let it get on with what it's doing what do we get on the right-click menu just the standard stuff terminal so if I hit terminal after clicking on home great it opens up a terminal in home OTB that's quite nice let's have a look generally at some of the other things it's set up so if I go cat et Cie fstab you will see here that it has indeed mounted the fat32 ESP partition on boot efi which was the option are selected and it's created an ext4 partition there is no swap swap file here in this fstab so I presume it's running without that which is fine for the time being ok changes were made successfully so it closed but yeah I like the icon set it's a nice xfce desktop I presume I can use just standard pac-man commands so Sood pac-man syu and off it goes and it sinks sir the pac-man repose there's nothing to do I wonder if it's got an aur helper installed let's go to Pamuk again and see if it's installed already yay no it's not installed yay it obviously manages everything through / Mac I personally would install yay myself but I like to manage the aur from a command line guys I don't quite know what else to say about this it's a nice xfce system its arch of course which gives you the option to run whatever you want you can add other desktops to it clearly Manjaro settings manager is that what we've already seen no it isn't I miss this one completely so where is that should you need it Manjaro settings manager let me just search for it so if you just search for Manjaro settings manager this is separate to the standard xfce settings and if I click on kernel there I just want to see what happens okay so it brings up it brings up that so language packs okay so the because I selected GB right from the word go it's selected all the UK English packages by the looks of it let's move down a little bit yeah it has automatically although the u.s. language packs were already there so that's available language packs and its installed GB and us ok good what else we got here locale settings ok I'm gonna remove United States sorry guys just so I have a UK is default let's go back user account OTB ok great and I can add another user here presumably yes I can I do like that I like that a lot and time and date ok I can set up time and date automatically hardware clock is in local timezone which is what we want and it's certainly coming up with the right time ok I'm gonna quit this now nice desktop its arch but not arch its maintained by the Mandara to developers because they hold packages back the idea is that it's not quite as a worrisome as arch could be because using the stable repo make sure that the packages should work ok let's go and have a chat about this okay so that's Manjaro xfce edition by the way i just before i shut down i did try the print utility and it print picked up my canon mg 5600 straightaway and i was able to to test page so kudos for that so what do I think about it well I like arch the world of Linux seems sometimes to be divided into arch based distributions and Debian distributions and I do like both I have to say I thought man Jaros implementation in terms of their theming was great I like the welcome screen I liked many of the default applications that it comes pre-installed with and some of the additional tools and configuration utilities what I didn't like was when I first booted it in VirtualBox how long it took to actually boot I'm gonna blame VirtualBox for that rather than Manjaro because I'm sure it's something to do with that and a mixture of Manjaro xur hardware detection utility it did boot but if you try it yourself please be patient what I really wasn't impressed with is the fact that it completely failed to do the default install it bombed out and we ended up with a fat32 partition created but with no mount points and no ext4 partition for root whether that was just one of those things that occasionally happens or not I don't know but going into manual configuration it all seemed to work fine although every time I rebooted the system it did come up with trying to boot from CD DVD before it reset itself and booted correctly all of this could of course be VirtualBox issues so I would be prepared to put it down to that but if you if you give it a go in VirtualBox just be patient guys it takes a long long time to boot other than that though the installation was pretty flawless I love the fact that it provides documentation written documentation and manual I think that's great the idea of holding packages back just to make sure that they're working properly I also think is pretty useful I can't say I've had major problems with a standard arch distribution but you know it just gives it that little bit extra so if you want to give it a go guys it's incredibly popular why not give it a spin it's a nice desktop it's easy to get up and running has it got much over arch itself for me personally I think I'd still go for a standard arch and in terms of look and feel I I'm probably leaning a bit more towards the arco Linux if I was looking at a variant of arch but it's certainly a great desktop and the extra stability probably makes it more useful for some users see what you think give it a crack that's what I love about Linux is just so much choice so Manjaro as I say it's arts gym but not as we know it it's its own custom based distro based on arch so have a great weekend everyone and I'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 51,314

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, manjaro, manjaro xfce, manjaro a different beast, manjaro its arch jim, arch linux, arch xfce, manjaro linux review, manjaro linux install, manjaro linux xfce, manjaro xfce 18.1.5, arch linux install, arch xfce customization, manjaro how to, linux tutorial, arch xfce4, manjaro how to install, manjaro how to switch kernel, manjaro review, its life jim, how to install manjaro linux on virtualbox

Id: UlM5rnaZthw

Length: 44min 42sec (2682 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 22 2020