Based on the amazing impression the Manjaro Raspberry Pi 4b arm left me with, and the frustration I had been feeling with ubuntu lately (mandatory snaps), I decided to try Manjaro on my beastly primary custo laptop that has been running ubuntu desktop up until now.
To make a long story short, the normal “mere mortal” installer worked great, but because this laptop has multiple drives with luks and I have a certain way I wanted to lay out luks + lvm, I elected to do an architect install.
Now, architect was a bit frustrating at first because I felt it has a general lack of a “go back” function at times, so it took me a few whacks to understand the flow (especially when mounting stuff) but that’s a totally different discussion. Unfortunately, no matter what I selected in terms of kde-minimal + “select full install” resulted in what I would call a complete or functional install.
What I was left with after reboot was a kde plasma defaulted to wayland that was completely non manjaro themed and had essentially a bare minimum of kde packages installed and NO NETWORK or NetworkManager available. I probably did 4 installs like this convinced that I had somehow noob-borked my way through MA, but alas, I think it’s just busted and doesn’t install the right stuff. It did, however, setup my lvm and luks exactly as I had asked, and that was great, but I was dead in the water after a reboot due to no network.
What I ended up doing on the final install was to chroot into the install and manually ensure I had everything to get the network up on reboot such as NetworkManager. Then on reboot, I systemctl enabled NetworkManager and used the text interface to network manager to get the network loaded up and proceeded to pacman my way into a fully functional kde plasma env, but given that I’m a Manjaro noob, searching and figuring out all the package names to accomplish this was frustrating, but a pattern emerged, and I’m a big boy, so I got it done.
I also immediately changed to xorg as kde plasma crashed all over itself repeatedly doing multi monitor stuff and. I hope Wayland isn’t the default for kde installs in general as it was a piece and isn’t ready for prime time as far as I’m concerned (can’t adjust gamma either, ugg).
In any case, I honestly don’t know how to report this as an issue (the architect thing simply not producing a usable install). Perhaps I did something wrong? I don’t see how. It felt like the architect installer just hasn’t been updated with the latest kde package or group names.