Best guess as to what is wrong: something about the installer scripts means that the Manjaro system really doesn’t like being down the list on my partition hierarchy, or else something bloating is really bugged
I installed Plasma and it took well over a minute to boot, whereas previous Plasma editions have booted in seconds. Interestingly, I get several things shown to me that no other distro shows me - namely a HP logo, twice, before and after a verbose output from systemd.
As for the i3 spin, it simply wouldn’t boot at all. I didn’t leave the PC on all night to see if it would ever get there, but after 2/3 minutes I was still just staring at my HP logo.
Full disclosure: I’m a systemd-free advocate, and was testing these editions just for testing, and in particular to see if the Manjaro i3 spin would give me an easy-to-use introduction to this window manager, but if this issue can be fixed, I would actually like to continue to test.
It is possible to run Manjaro on a bios/gpt partition layout.
Anecdotal commen: Depending on the system firmware - I have a system with a flaky EFI - old Intel desktop board for what that is worth (Intel invented EFI) - it was a pain to install - the grub loader was so slow I thought it didn’t work.
Yesterday I was playing around with the latest KDE on an Acer Aspire dual-core Celeron N3350 4G ram.
I boots without hickups and the installation was flawless (used KDE minimal 21.1.6 on a 500G WD USB-C booted by ventory).
From your short description of yourself - I would expect you know all about writing ISO to USB using dd with all bells, whistles, precautions, flush on write and what-not.
I cannot recognize your experience - which lead to thoughts on the aforementioned firmware, an incomplete ISO, a flaky USB or a USB write gone wrong.
But you may already have eliminated those thoughts.
To be clear, on this one hard drive, I now have partitions with:
antix 19
antiX 21 (separate partition because it is still new and buggy for me)
artix
Tumbleweed (for training on RPM-based systems and another token systemd setup)
Obarun
Space for Puppy frugal files
Swap
All other systems boot absolutely fine and quickly
The Manjaro i3 system simply won’t boot
The Plasma one that preceded it took so long to boot I could have completed the first level of Quake and still been waiting
Nothing wrong with the USB stick or the DD write process
I really doubt firmware can be an issue since a) I have zero problems booting the other systems and b) I have previously had (on this same machine) - previous versions of Manjaro KDE and Budgie
I wanted to find a nice distro for testing i3. I think I will use the Artix one since no one has any good leads as to why Manjaro won’t boot.