How stable is the distro lately? A few questions about how the distro works:

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Hi, I have used Manjaro successfully 3 yrs ago, until I needed windows for some proprietary stuff.

I’m looking to get back into it, my build is Nvidia mx150 , 7300HQ and 8 GB ram.

I am looking to get a new Samsung Evo sata SSD to run this distro through my Orico usb 3 SCSI adapter.

How stable is the distro lately and how well should it work with my Nvidia ( I had small .8 second freezes but it worked without overheating as it did on endeavour os)?

It worked pretty well, I’d say even better than windows 11 on my 2018 hardware. Not too much to complain about it.

The only small problem was that I had a few broken packages that I later resolved by uninstalling and reinstalling packages.

I just wanted to ask, since I remember that you were using Calamares, does selecting the empty SSD( up above where you select SSD) and selecting the delete disk option still put the bootloader and Linux on the same disk( I’d rather not have grub on the special disk where my old windows 10 is) ?

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Is KDE more stable than before? I remember that it used to be very unstable and problematic in 2021 when I bought my Orico adapter. That’s why I ran Cinnamon I guess, there were many issues with KDE( it was breaking over and over for many, reporting back on forums) , but I’d use it this time if it were to be better.

Also, If I recall correctly Sudo pacman -Syu was for updating the whole OS and Sudo pacman -S was to install software, right?

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sudo is never capitalized. Also, you should never install new software without updating first. So if you want to install chromium, you should still run sudo pacman -Syu chromium. If there are no updates, it will just install the packages you requested. If there are updates, it will install them along with the packages you requested. Not updating when installing new software can put you in a state where your outdated versions of libraries are incompatible with current versions of software.

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I’d recommend disconnecting the Windows disk.

As for the pacman commands — I recommend using sudo pacman -Syu <package> as this syncs the system and then installs the added package. (@ben75 beat me to it!).

As for “stability”: it’s a matter of maintenance. This system has been running for well over 6 years, for example.

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Yea it’s my android keyboard capitalizing them, I always used something to update it before, I guess it was sudo pacman -Syu

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I suspect these were packages installed from AUR. I have quite a bit from there myself, but it’s made very clear that you use AUR at your own risk. AUR packages may be linked against libraries that get changed when there’s an update and this has a good chance of breaking them until you re-build them.

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I remember that I didn’t disconnect the SSD before, I just double checked and carried on with the installation.

I couldn’t do it anyway, since it’s a laptop

I hope it’s not a problem in nowadays that I don’t disconnect it ( I’m also here to ask if the installer is working right, the Calamares, not to have it write the esp on the Intel SSD that has windows 10)

I will also check, everything should be on dev/sdc if I recall correctly

I hope I should not manually partition, I just never did it before

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Yea, perhaps, I just don’t remember, maybe it was something like pycharm or something else like chromium I got from aur

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Manjaro itself is quite stable. Most of the reported problems we get turn out to be located in the biological circuitry between the keyboards and the chairs, but unfortunately, we cannot debug those, because we don’t have access to the source code.

:smiling_imp:

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Eh, user error, huh?

Well, let’s hope for the best, I’ll try installing as I explained, I hope it works out( I don’t have screwdrivers).

Would you recommend KDE or cinnamon?

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KDE likely will have better support, as many more of us use this.

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Cinnamon was designed to most closely resemble Microsoft Windows, and appears to be very popular among people coming from that ecosystem.

Myself, I am not a Windows user, and I prefer Plasma, because it’s the most advanced and most flexible desktop environment available. One can make it look (and behave) like whatever one wants.

In terms of support, one thing to keep in mind is that the Cinnamon edition is a community edition, not an official Manjaro edition, and therefore, the number of experienced people here at the forum who might be able to help out with Cinnamon-specific issues will be lower than the amount of experienced people running Plasma, GNOME or Xfce.

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Another choice not mentioned would be: Xfce4 :grin:
… it may look like a joke, with the emoji and all - but I am serious
if you are after reliability and stability :man_shrugging:

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I might try it

Thx :pray:

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Screenshot shows bootloader set to be installed to MBR of selected storage device

Boot Loader location: Master Boot Record of VMware, VMware Virtual 5 (/dev/sda/)

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For me, 100% stable running Plasma (Testing) for about 8 years.

This sounds a little like unsupported AUR packages, which do require rebuilding sometimes. These bits of housework never rendered my installation ‘unstable’ in any way, other than occasionally they’d throw an error and need a quick rebuild.

Certainly Plasma 6xx has been stable for me - though the upcoming update to 6.3 is likely to force me to switch themes - as darkly, and klassy are affected by changes and need to be updated (hopefully will be sorted soon) - so as always, a possible need for some folks to dial back to default settings/themes - we’ll find out when it’s pushed through unstable/testing.

We must be careful and above all accurate… not just because this isn’t reddit, but also because if you copy/paste your commands they just will not work!

pacman -Syu will refresh and update the core system.
pamac upgrade will update the core system plus AUR.
pamac install lsd will install lsd.
sudo pacman -S lsd will install lsd.

As a less experienced user, I’d recommend installing FISH in your terminal - you can fire it up by simply typing ‘fish’ and then you can access some manual entries with your tab key…

So typing 'pacman -`tab will get this:

❯ pacman -
-D  --database    (Modify the package database)  -S  --sync               (Synchronize packages)
-F  --files          (Query the files database)  -T  --deptest              (Check dependencies)
-h  --help                       (Display help)  -U  --upgrade  (Upgrade or add a local package)
-Q  --query        (Query the package database)  -V  --version        (Display version and exit)
-R  --remove  (Remove packages from the system)

You can type one letter, then hit TAB to get more options. Let’s go with ‘Query’:

❯ pacman -Q 
-Qb                         (Alternate database location)  -Qn  (list installed packages only found in sync database)
-Qc                      (View the change log of PACKAGE)  -Qo                     (Query the package that owns FILE)
-Qd      (List only non-explicit packages (dependencies))  -Qp         (Query a package file instead of the database)
-Qe             (List only explicitly installed packages)  -Qq                                (Show less information)
-Qg              (Display members of [all] package GROUP)  -Qr                          (Alternate installation root)
-Qh                                        (Display help)  -Qs         (Search locally-installed packages for regexp)
-Qi             (View PACKAGE [backup files] information)  -Qt       (List only unrequired packages [and optdepends])
-Qk                      (Check that PACKAGE files exist)  -Qu                       (List only out-of-date packages)
-Ql                     (List the files owned by PACKAGE)  -QV                             (Display version and exit)
-Qm  (List installed packages not found in sync database)  -Qv                          (Output more status messages)

So let’s see package information for ‘lsd’

❯ pacman -Qi lsd 

Name            : lsd
Version         : 1.1.5-1
Description     : Modern ls with a lot of pretty colors and awesome icons
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd
Licenses        : Apache-2.0
Groups          : None
Provides        : None
Depends On      : gcc-libs  zlib
Optional Deps   : nerd-fonts
                  awesome-terminal-fonts
Required By     : None
Optional For    : None
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Installed Size  : 3.43 MiB
Packager        : Orhun Parmaksız <orhun@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : Wed 21 Aug 2024 01:30:54 +07
Install Date    : Tue 27 Aug 2024 13:02:14 +07
Install Reason  : Explicitly installed
Install Script  : No
Validated By    : Signature

It doesn’t take too long to get used to it.

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It might be noted that fish is not posix-compliant.
And many things like aliases and variables will not work as expected.

It would not be a good choice for ‘learning’ or ‘collaborating’ (development).

Its also less configurable than other options (like zsh), but strives to implement various features by default.

So if you like the way it works out of the box then it might still be a viable choice for your personal shell.

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I’m not entirely sure zsh is fully posix-compliant … one reason I resent the defaults being set otherwise.

Apart from the Terminal outputs partially consisting of unprintable characters …

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Yes, no need to set it as the default shell; just invoke it to use some of the built-in functions:

you can fire it up by simply typing ‘fish’

I really like abbreviations in FISH, rather more than ZSH alias commands (though I have them both set up such that they both behave very similarly.

It’s also useful to set up ZSH to expand Alias commands:

like this: 
#-------- Global Alias {{{
globalias() {
  if [[ $LBUFFER =~ '[a-zA-Z0-9]+$' ]]; then
    zle _expand_alias
    zle expand-word
  fi
  zle self-insert
}
zle -N globalias
bindkey " " globalias                 # space key to expand globalalias
# bindkey "^ " magic-space            # control-space to bypass completion
bindkey "^[[Z" magic-space            # shift-tab to bypass completion
bindkey -M isearch " " magic-space    # normal space during searches

#}}}
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zsh isnt either, but fish is considered “exotic” in that it has very very different syntax … not just a slightly different behavior with, ex, brace expansion.

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That’s the polite way of putting it…

I found the syntax slightly strange:

alias ff='clear && fastfetch'
abbr ff 'clear && fastfetch'