Many other distros have different flavors and choices too, but one specific is often given the most attention and polish. I recall earlier on Manjaro the “default” was that modified Xfce desktop flavor.
How is the case nowadays? Is Manjaro with Plasma desktop the “flagship” of Manjaro? Or is there such thing? All flavors get equal love, or how does it go in practice? I have gotten my interest back on Manjaro because of many user friendly aspects (both snap and flatpak support in by default and so on).
Well, it’s a tricky question to answer. There are three official editions of Manjaro — XFCE, Plasma and GNOME — and I personally feel that all three of them enjoy an equal amount of love from the team. All three of the official editions are put together with great care and attention to detail.
On the other hand, @philm, as Grandmaster of the Secret Order of the Manjaruminati, does himself use and prefer XFCE, even though he is mostly coding for Plasma Mobile on ARM. He also maintains close contact with the KDE developers upstream. And XFCE was the very first desktop environment featured in Manjaro, so I guess there is still something to be said — at least, in theory — for the argument that it would be the flagship edition.
On the other hand, judging by what appears to be most popular here among the forum members from my own perspective, the Plasma edition was until recently the most-often downloaded flavor, but I am seeing more and more GNOME-related posts recently.
Of course, that could be because there are more problems with GNOME than with the other desktop environments (), but to be honest, I don’t think that’s true. As the matter of fact, when we moved from Plasma 5.24 to 5.25, there were a huge amount of problems with that transition — all sorted out by now, of course, and right now we’re on the excellent 5.27 LTS release of Plasma.
In the end, I don’t think there would be any huge difference in the number of downloads for each of the official editions, and several of the community editions are also proving quite popular — e.g. MATE, Budgie, Cinnamon and i3. And then there are the spins, but I have no real idea as to how popular they are, and it’s probably difficult to compile any numbers on that, given that they’re not being hosted at the same location as the official and community editions.
So, yeah, regardless of what is or is not officially considered the flagship edition, I’m going to keep it at that all three editions are equally valued and equally good. And so whichever one you pick is only going to come down to personal taste.
Oh sorry, i don’t understand. Remove Plasma it says? So it’s quite the opposite of what was assuming that the Plasma edition is any kind of flagship? The Plasma edition is to be removed from flavors?
Ok thanks ALOT for a clear and quick reply! Now i understand.
After reading this, it kinda makes me wonder would it be beneficial to spare resources by limiting Manjaro to just ONE release? Or maybe a chance to choose from 3 desktops DURING INSTALLATION?
I know that many people (especially the new users to Linux) are overwhelmed by all these differrent downloads and flavors. But they could understand the thing better if they are shown these different desktops during the install and clicking to choose one to install that time.
If this is a roadblock for them, they should NOT install Manjaro in the first place. This is kind of a technical distribution, as all Arch based distros are. There is not much to understand here, different ISO for different desktop environment and pre-configuration. The Download page is pretty self explanatory.
Please let that not be so. We would be losing a significant number of users over such a bad decision.
That’s how it used to be in all distributions, but the individual desktop environments have in the meantime grown to such huge proportions that this is no longer feasible if we want to keep the .iso at a reasonable size.
As I said above, that is no longer feasible, but the download page gives a concise description (with screenshots) for each of the available editions. And then there’s the Wiki, which should help people on their way.
But here’s the catch: Manjaro is based upon Arch, and although it is more user-friendly than Arch, it still remains a technical distribution. Ample documentation is provided, but sadly enough, that documentation isn’t going to do any good if people won’t even look at it.
And unfortunately, the vast majority of the new members signing up at the forum fall into that category of users — they’re not interested in the operating system; they want a kitchen sink appliance. Those people would actually be better off with a distribution geared toward absolute beginners, like Ubuntu or Mint.
The Manjaro team does its very best at making the experience of installing, using and updating the Manjaro distribution as smooth as possible, but nothing is ever perfect, and a certain willingness from the user is required to at least look around on the forum before posting a question or reporting a problem that has already been posted 15 times before in the last 24 hours.
Every major update always comes with a dedicated thread under the Announcements category, which not only details the changes, but also the potential gotchas and how to work around them. And Manjaro is a (curated) rolling-release distribution, so people are expected to keep their systems updated.
But almost every day, we get people starting a new thread here at the forum about some kind of breakage, and then it turns out that they haven’t updated their systems anymore in ages — sometimes years. Which is not supported. But then they expect us to solve their mess for them.
We are all volunteers here, and it does get tiresome having to explain the same thing over and over again because people are too lazy to use the forum’s search engine, or look around in our by now already substantial Tutorials section, and/or because they feel so self-important that they demand 100% of our attention, and “by yesterday”. And believe me, we do get loads of such entitled people here at the forum.
The problem is not that Manjaro (or GNU/Linux in general) would not be user-friendly enough, but rather that the vast majority of our users aren’t GNU/Linux-friendly.
One other thing that makes me puzzled (as returning to try Manjaro) is what happened to BAUH? As i understand it, that tool included pretty much “all” packages supported, snap and flatpak, appimage and so on (so the user would just click away no matter what package type was available to what).
bauh is not in our repositories anymore, although it can still be installed by way of the AUR.
As I understand it — someone will correct me if I’m wrong — pamac should now be able to do all that bauh did, although I myself only ever use pamac from the command line, and even then still, only so as to update my AUR packages. So I’m not familiar with pamac’s GUI because I never use it — and I don’t use any Snaps, FlatPaks or Appimages.
Nothing really, but that GitLab link given stated something about removing Plasma. I asked which desktop is the flagship and most maintained on Manjaro. If there is one. And seems as there maybe is but maybe there isnt.
manjaro offers three official flavours: plasma, gnome and xfce and if you stay on stable all three will always be maintenanced with the same actual care. there is no reason to worry about this. that might be a difference if you choose a community distro because they are maintenanced from other people that spend their free-time to it. as long as you choose one official distro is the only thing that matters your prefered flavour. choose plasma, gnome or xfce it’s just a question of your taste.
Ok good to know. Many people though DO “worry” about which is the “main one”. I suppose that’s just how many people’s minds work: they want The Thing, if you know what i mean.
Well … its not really iso size as the constraint … with there being net-install … manjaro just abandoned that approach a long time ago and hasnt really had any similar thing aside from architect, itself largely abandoned as well. (though we did do it for office suite choice … and nothing else … )
See, for example, Endeavor.
That, and then there’s also the fact that the streamlining of the different desktop environments and their default sets of tools may yield mutually incompatible configuration files, due to — for instance — GNOME and XFCE both being gtk-based but having a very different look & feel, and when using Plasma, you generally don’t want your gtk-based applications looking too different from the Plasma look & feel.
), but to be honest, I don’t think that’s true. 
As the matter of fact, when we moved from Plasma 5.24 to 5.25, there were a huge amount of problems with that transition — all sorted out by now, of course, and right now we’re on the excellent 5.27 LTS release of Plasma. 
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