Manjaro 1.8.3 Review : The “Noob Friendlier” ArchLinux

First of all, I want to introduce myself about my involvement in Linux world. I've been using Linux based OS for more than a year, so I'm definitely not a pro in here but I think my one year of experience is enough for this small review. My first distro was Ubuntu 11.10 and moved to Ubuntu 12.04, and then I started to get attracted by the user-friendliness of Linux Mint and ended up with LM 13 and 14 for more than half of my year in Linux. And then I started to get bored with that “friendly” OS and thinking of getting something more fun to learn more in this world, so I decided to change my OS.

The first distro caught in my eye was LMDE (the Debian based of Linux Mint) because of the rolling release system (means we don't have to reinstall the distro to get the most updated softwares), so I visited the community's forum and found that the ISO image of LMDE is not updated for almost 8 months and they answered my question and asked me to wait for someday in this month (January 2013) as they planned, so I waited and waited for some days (a week maybe) and still got no improvement. While my desire of testing a new distro is so uncontrollable (lol), so I decided to turn my direction to another distro. Surfing the net for a day and found out the fastest distro (ArchLinux) based user friendlier Manjaro from distrowatch.com and first thing came in my mind was “This it is what I want for my older spec laptop”. So I downloaded the MATE version of the ISO image because I'm bored with Xfce desktop as I used it in LM for too long and the other version is just too heavy for my “old friend”. The ISO image is 1.2GB, downloaded it for quite a time because of my slow internet connection (this is the reason I didn't install the un-updated LMDE). So, this is where my introductions finished and where this review begin.

Installation Process

Before continuing any further, this is my laptop spec:

Processor : Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T5870 @ 2.00GHz × 2

Graphic: Intel® 965GME/GLE x86/MMX/SSE2

OS type: 32-bit

RAM: 1 GB

I wrote the image into my 8GB USB flashdisk and booted it perfectly in my system, it displayed me the MATE desktop with a green background desktop which is not so attractive to me. The good things are it recognized my Wireless driver and touchpad immediately which I had to do it manually in both Ubuntu and Linux Mint. This is because of the manjaro-firmware package which is added by Manjaro developers which you can't find in ArchLinux (as I read it somewhere). And the next thing I did is clicking on the install Manjaro icon in the desktop to continue to installation process. The GUI is uglier than I thought, but as I saw it in the community's forum they are building a better GUI installer now which is good. I installed it with manual partitioning and directed it to mount 5 partitions (/boot, /home, /root, /media/data, and swap) and it did it without any problem. After finished the installation, I booted up the laptop and first thing in my mind was “This is so f**king awesome!” because it took for less than 10 seconds to get me into the login screen. The display manager is LXDM and everything was running without any problem.

Out of Box Softwares

The packages included in the MATE version of Manjaro are as follow:

Accessories: Calculator, Pluma, XTerm

Internet: Midori, Xchat, Avahi Server Browser, Pidgin, Sylpheed

Graphic: Gimp 2.8

Sound & Video: Xnoise

Office: Libreoffice installer

System: Gparted, Pacman-Gui, PkgBrowser, etc

Flash is included, so you can watch Youtube out of the box. There are something I find it missing is they don't include VLC media player which is included in other distros, but we can download it from the pacman-gui so this isn't a problem.

Software Management

The software management in Manjaro pacman, the same with ArchLinux as it is based on it. The difference is Manjaro provided it with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) using Pacman-GUI and PkgBrowser, but I find it very “unfriendly” and “ugly”. I think they should include a better one, for example gnome-packagekit, pacmanXG (which I'm using now), etc or make their own one. But after surfing at their forum I found out they are in the process of making it, the name of the software is pamac which is nice. Manjaro provided softwares from their own repositories which is enough for me, but some packages which isn't available in the repositories can be installed from AUR (Arch User Repository) by installing base-devel and yaourt. So you don't have to worry about anything about softwares here.

Conclusion

After using it for two days without any problem, I think this is going to be my daily use distro before I get bored with it (lol). There are a few pros and cons about this distro for me:

Pros:

- It's fast, I used MATE before in my Linux Mint and changed it immediately because it was too heavy, but Manjaro gives me a different effect of it.

- You don't have to re-install your OS to upgrade it. As it is based on Arch which is a rolling release distro, you will be given the most up-to-date packages from the repositories which means you don't have to re-install it unless you break it (this is also the con of rolling release distro).

- It detects your hardware automatically, unlike its “father” ArchLinux.

Cons:

- Hasn't got any good installer and package management GUI. “Professional and user friendly Linux at its best” is the motto of Manjaro, but their GUI is really ugly right now. And I believe they can do it better in the future as they promised, I hope :)

- As it is a new distro, so the artworks are still not so much like Ubuntu and Linux Mint have.

So that's my review about this distro, and I'm sorry if something I wrote here is wrong or anything but I really don't mean it. I just want to share my thought and really don't mean anything. Thanks for reading and please give me some comments if you want to share something about my article. :)