Just a brief look at Manjaro’s latest snapshot, 21.0 today.

I used the Cinnamon edition for various reasons; it’s great n stuff and most of you Mint users know and love this desktop anyway. So why change, right?

I’m gonna use GagaMore, the faster one of my mini-Lenovos for the test. No problems with that thing. Internet connects right away via ethernet.

So let’s see what’s what:

Since Manjaro comes with dedicated ISOs for each of their Official (Gnome, KDE Plasma, Xfce) and Community (Awesome, PSPWM, Budgie, Cinnamon, i3, LSDE, LXQt, Mate, Openbox) Editions the installation only took some minutes. Not like with EndeavourOS where it takes between 20 and 30 minutes.

Let’s not lose many words about the install, it’s a baby easy thing and no problems are to be expected if you didn’t forget your real or made-up name. 😉

Manjaro got its nickname as Ubuntu of the Arch world not without reason. It’s densely packed with goodies/nannyshit to the brim and comes with enough additional software for most people to start working and being awesome right away. Office suites, multimedia players and creators, web browser and emailer, piratey stuff. In other words, Manjaro comes with everything but the kitchen sink. And if you insist you can install the kitchen sink in a matter of just seconds. =^.^=

I don’t even waste any time with such stuff but go directly to town and install a 3rd party Second Life viewer from the Arch User Repository (AUR). The AUR is already preinstalled in Manjaro btw. And, just so you know, if you can install a pretty complex virtual world viewer just like that, every other software shouldn’t pose any problem at all.

But no matter if you use the official Arch repo, or the AUR, Manjo comes with a GUI installer, which means you can install all kinds of shit per mouseclick and will miss the joys of doing it in terminal. 🙂

As a negative I must mention that Manjaro at first didn’t recognize my 1366×768 (16×9) screen but gave me a standard 1024×768 (4×3) resolution. No other distro ever had any problems identifying the connected screens. I had to correctify that manually. Hopefully the Manjaro guys have sorted that stuff out in snapshot 21.0. Oh, btw, since Cinnamon is just a Community Edition it hasn’t updated to version 21.0 yet. No idea why Manjaro still insists on this silly 2-class system and doesn’t manage these things centrally. 😦

I guess I must repeat this test once Manjaro Cinnamon is on 21.0, too. Maybe then little buggies like the missing screen recognition n shit will be sorted.

All in all I gotta say Manjaro is a damn fine allround Linux distro. That it’s based on ArchLinux is just a bonus as from the day to day operation there shouldn’t be a great difference to Linux Mint. You can do everything in Manjaro without ever touching the dreaded Terminal. Why you don’t wanna use the Terminal is a discussion for another day. Just be assured, Manjo, like every Arch-ish distro of course comes with a terminal, and if you dare looking into it you’ll find out how great and elegant your computing will become. 😉

Slowly I begin to understand why Manjaro is such a beloved system and why hubby reverted back to it after sharing my Arch carreer in parallel. He went with me from Manjaro via Namib and Archman to Endeavour … where he finally had enough. 😮

Contrary to more vanilla Arch compatible systems the Manjaro devs are holding updates back for about 2 weeks. For security reasons they claim. In my humble opinion this sometimes causes more trouble but let’s not go there now. In any way, Manjaro is complete right out of the box, like Mint, and it won’t distract you with 10 daily updates but only send you one big packet every fortnight. Yes, I gotta admit, one needs to be a special kind of geek to be happy with Arch’s steadily flowing update policy so they might prefer Manjaro’s more tame update path.

Can I recommend Manjaro Cinnamon? For you? Yes, and yes!

It’s complete like Mint, easy to use like Mint but faster and more versatile. And much more up-to-date!