A lot of community distributions are now unsupported?
Some time age i can download, install and use these distribs of manjaro:
-openbox
-awesome
-lxde
-lxqt
-bspwm
…
now it dissapeared from main menu manjaro.org/download
when i found folder in archive, it says that these are unsupported…
i search site news, google and this forum for information about deprecation and cannot found anything about it
Are these distributions now really deprecated and unsupported?
Hi @gdbdable, and welcome!
If I understand it correctly community editions are just that. Created and maintained by the Manjaro community. By volunteers, for the love of it.
So they have never been officially supported. For that there are the three official distributions you can find on the download page.
That said, there is also the spins section where you’ll find many community editions.
Welcome,
The community editions are not unsupported in the meaning you are on your own, but they are outdated (a bit old) .
They have all been shipped with kernel 5.13 [EOL]. Why no LTS kernel ? If I remember correct, people here in the forum complaied a lot about kernel 5.10 at the time of release.
This is good stuff right here.
Hi - I’m curious about the LXQT community version. I read the volunteer who maintained it can no longer do so, but an older version of the ISO is available elsewhere. Here’s my dumb question - if I install an “old” version of it, going forward what will I miss out on if it it’s no longer maintained? Will pacman or pamac updates stop working for that installation? From an already-installed perspective, what will (or won’t) happen?
It could be problematic to run updates since a lot might have changed in the meantime.
But if you can manage to run the updates
you will then have a current system.
Just try … if it’s not too old it should present few problems.
The sheer size of updates will be about the same as the size of the iso you just used to install, because nearly everything would need to be replaced when the iso is a few months old - and I’d not run the updates in a graphical session but in TTY
Anyone can rebuild a current ISO from the ISO profiles available, with up to date packages. Follow this simple video tutorial and you can do it easily
You can even customize the kernel, and add/remove packages pre-installed.
@linux-aarhus has an unofficial build of lxqt here
You mean run pacman -Syu instead? What could go wrong with pamac?
No he meant on a TTY, not in the graphical interface (not in the desktop at all).
No … they mean drop to the TTY - an allusion to the old teletype terminals, though we dont use tape and such any more … In windoze terms it would be like ‘dropping to DOS’ …
Hitting Ctrl+Alt+Fx (x being a number so … F5) would switch terminal sessions … by default one, often F1 or F2, is graphical and the others are ‘bare’ …
The point of doing the upgrade in such an environment would be to avoid any (apparent?) system halts due to some sort of graphics break during more strenuous upgrades to drivers, X, DE, etc.
(note - what is often referred to as a terminal on your desktop, such as ‘konsole’, is actually a ‘terminal emulator’ … theres some fun history there if you care to dive)
For some incidentally related information maybe see this:
[HowTo] Resolve an unbootable Manjaro (black screen, login failed, cant boot, etc)
There is two types of Community editions.
The type which is built by teammembers and the type build by community members.
The editions build by community members can be found in the spins section as already noted.
The editions build by team members which is committed to active maintainance is usually listed on the homepage.
When you refer the openbox based editions _lxde, lxqt and openbox they are supported as well but there is no maintainer committed to maintain them on a regular schedule.
The term unsupported you refer to is because the osdn provider initiated a migration to a new storage provider and this migration left the Manjaro project in an impossible situation where upload of new images would take days. Unsupported also refers to the availability of more recent ISOs and the fact that the unsupported ISO may utilize drivers and kernels which has been long deprected. Syncing an installation made from an unsupported ISO may be next to impossible due to the rapid change of packages - the nature of rolling release.
The previous official openbox community editions became unofficial when I was no longer able to commit to a stable rebuild schedule.
The content of these - unofficial - ISO is built entirely from Manjaro repo and fully supported when syncing your installation.
Hi @linux-aarhus - I just downloaded your version of LXQT. It’s really nice. Thanks for keeping a version out there. I think more people should try it.