For me, just my simple understanding, stable is about a software crashing or having problems.
Honestly I never thought of stable in the other definition of how frequent it changes.
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Nope, I donât distro hop. I started back then with Ubuntu (still with Unity!), then Xubuntu, then with Mint for few months. Mint was fine, but I just donât like the feel, how it looks and I wanted and needed the newer stuff. It was frustrating that the bugs that I encountered were already fixed but since I had a frozen package, I would have to endure it for the next couple of years! That was crazy. Also, the newest versions had the new, great features and I wanted to use them. This was exciting. While on Mint, it was incredibly boring and frustrating.
When I moved to Manjaro, it had the ânewâ Plasma 5 back then, still full of bugs, but that was the DE that I loved the most, and I grew with it so to speak. I experimented with parallel installed Gnome, but ultimately, I hated the Gnomeâs approach and the limitation of the DE. Never looked back.
Manjaro fulfills my needs. I recently had occasion to test Ubuntu based OS on another hardware and it was all I remembered and what I hated it for. Nope thanks. I also had experience with MX Linux (Debian) and Suse in the past. I HATED IT TO THE GUTS! As much I dislike Ubuntu based systems, Debian and Suse were way worse. The only distros I could take into account are other Arch based systems, but why would I want that? They donât have anything more than Manjaro has and Iâm quite comfortable here. For me, there is no real choice. If Manjaro even becomes unacceptable for some reason, there are many other Arch derivatives, so Iâm covered. Distro hoping is past me, because I know, the other distros donât have what I want: continous, stable, rolling system. Suse kinda has that but lacked apps and AUR, plus I hated the repos apprach and it was a real dependency hell. To add an app you had to add repo and then it would often crash other apps and cause conflicts.
Nowadays, we have flatpacks and snaps, but I donât like those and consider them a last resort. Arch and AUR is the best system there is for me, and I like the stability Manjaro brings. I love MHWD (easy graphical and driver system) and manjaro-chroot (super easy chroot and fixing system, which I needed many times, so my history wasnât always that smooth, but I was always able to save my OS with backups and chroot access).
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Very similar to my experience of distro-hopping. Even taking into account my inexperience with Linux in general, Ubuntu and Mint (which a lot of people raved about) never really stuck with me. I never actually felt comfortable with any of the distros until I came across one that had the KDE Plasma desktop. From that point on, if a distro didnât offer Plasma as an option, I bypassed it. However, I actually liked MX Linux (and antiX just before that) and I liked it even more when KDE Plasma came with it. MX is still on one of my laptops but I can never seem to get around to updating it to the current release. That sort of ongoing obstacle, having to do a major reinstall every year or so, is what caused me to look to a rolling release. That led me to Manjaro and I very quickly found that my distro-hopping days were over.
Despite having decided that Manjaro was what I intended to use, it still took me quite a while to get past the inertia of using Windows 7. But I did eventually decide to go cold turkey and install Manjaro on all my computers, leaving Win7 as a dual boot on just one laptop. I found myself nearly a year later realizing I had not touched that laptopâs Win7 install even once. Not too long ago, @linux-aarhus posted something that began with âSwitching OS is like getting a new car.â The full post is here â
Windows 11 Not playing nice with Manjaro dual booting - #3 by linux-aarhus
It was exactly the kick in the pants I wish I had gotten back then to get off Windows once and for all. His description is absolutely PERFECT!
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Exactly. My distro hopping the past few months I concluded Arch/Arch based is the way to go. To be honest I really loved only Debian and MX Linux, but they are not responsive as Arch/Arch based.
I am old and old school. I believe software is meant to be installed.
I loved MX Linux especially their apps like thise for creating an ISO from the installed system, creating a bootable USB FlashDisk from an ISO.
I really wish to see those here in Manjaro.
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You can do that - there is just not an app for it - but you can do it fairly easy, when you ask an old fox.
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That was what drew me to antiX and then to its big brother MX Linux â the ability to put the OS with persistence on a flash drive and use it on any of my computers. Whichever of the computers I had available, Iâd boot the USB drive and continue working from wherever I had left off. It was a huge plus when I was distro-hopping as I could move my work to any computer without actually locking in the install. All of that changed when I decided to stay with Manjaro, installing it on each of my machines. I no longer needed that portability.
There is a way, supposedly, to do this install of Manjaro on a USB drive. Itâs not necessarily for the faint of heart (and I donât think itâs the same as what @linux-aarhus referenced in his post just now). Here is the post I found if you want to experiment and have the time to spare (of course you have the time â youâre retired!!!)
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I may have misunderstood that about putting it on a flash drive.
Technically is is fairly easy to copy the system to a movable device - for portablitiy - although - one need to boot the flash drive and add additional drivers - if it must be truly portable.
Also some special attention to the bootloader is needed to not interfere with the systemâs boootloader.
But yes - you can rsync your root to a prepared device - no problems there.
That is an idea worth playing with when I get the time.
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That was the interesting oddity of antiX and MX Linux â the developers included that portability specifically as part of its design. One could install directly to a flash drive and boot it on different machines. It would load itself into RAM and from there allow the user to do work, saving documents directly to the flash drive or to RAM where it would rsync the docs to the flash drive during the shutdown process. Back then, I was using USB 2.0 drives and it would take some bit of time for a few of these processes to save over to the drive, but using the OS itself was really snappy because it was all in RAM.
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I generally love foxes for being smart and cute.
Honestly I learned a lot from you in just a few hours.
This looks so technical for me. But I will try study it.
But, won;t an app be much better as in MX Linux to do it instead of doing it manually?
I believe the app(s) are there, they are open source, they might just need a bit of modification to work with Arch or with Manjaro.
Maybe there is some other app to snapshot the current installed system to an ISO file.
I usually have a USB with NomadBSD closeby, in case itâs ever needed. Typically Iâd use it as a Portable OS but also as a handy bootable repair kit.
In my experience, thereâs never much to repair with Manjaro, however, itâs still nice to have something more than an Installer ISO available. I combined this with an instance of Ventoy to allow booting a Manjaro Installer or other ISOs from the same USB, if needed.
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Just to clarify the intention of the MX tool.
It is designed to create a system which can be used to install or reinstall a MX/Antix system.
As I read it - it is designed as a recovery tool to recreate your running installation with or without user accounts and home content.
If you run it from the USB you may used the apps and save data to another partition on the stick.
And that is what I referred to above when I wrote that you can use Manjaro tools to create an ISO from your running system.
The MX-snapshot tool is written using C++ and is tailored for MX/Antix systems - quoting
Program for creating a live-CD from MX Linux and antiX running system
JUST TO CLARIFY, this program is meant for MX Linux and antiX it wonât work on another other system without considerable modifications because other systems donât have the infrastructure needed to run this program. Donât try to install the deb it wonât work and might ruin your system.
WARNING
This tool is not actively tested on any other systems, it might or might not work, it might or might not break things. Basically, we donât recommend it for anything other than MX or antiX compatible systems.
At that time, I used MX entirely as a portable OS to test its suitability for my switch to Linux. I had never considered it for use in repair. Shortly after installing Manjaro on a new laptop I ran in to a major problem after attempting to do an update of the Win10 that was also on the laptop. The update clobbered Manjaro and I had relied on Rescuezilla as my repair utility. [side note: in the end, I wiped Win10 entirely off the system and it became a sole Manjaro install]. And, as you said, I donât have much need of any repair utilities for Manjaro but I still have Rescuezilla on a Ventoy to do my disk imaging prior to every Stable update.
The neat thing I found about MXâs live-USB was the ability to customize it, install and uninstall apps, using not only as a portable OS but then to install it on a computer in that state. I had played with it, changing and adding and deleting and finally installed it that way on one of the laptops.
My initial impression about building a Manjaro ISO was that its intended use was as a customized Manjaro installation tool as opposed to creating a portable version of Manjaro. That would be pretty cool as well!
Celebrating 1 full week on Manjaro, KDE Stable, latest 2 LTS kernels.
In like 2 or 3 days I made a fresh install with BTRFS, and related stuff so it automatically snapshots whenever I install/uninstall/update⌠and now I have this amazing option to boot to a previous snapshot.
Strangely, as I was distro hopping for the past few months (then recently Ventoy), I do not feel the urge to try something else!
My conclusion after distro hopping and trying almost everything out there:
-yes Debian an MX Linux are truly stable and good
- I believe any OS should be rolling.
- Manjaro team did a great job by having stable, testing, unstable repos. This is a great plus to Arch. Though Arch is reasonably stable, Manjaro developers added more stability. Stability plus rolling.
- I am happy with the responsiveness of Arch based in general
So I am having the best of both worlds, stability, rolling, responsiveness. I do not know of any other distro that offers the same, I wonât dare and say better.
I am vey satisfied with performance, responsiveness and stability.
I wish I discovered Manajaro long time ago.
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Btrfs is a complicated beast. Just be sure to read how those snapshots actually work. Because booting one does not make it permanent.
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Sure, as far as I understand I just boot to a good working snapshot (the latest I think) then from the assistant I select one snapshot to roll back to then reboot. Right?
Not sure i donât use btrfs. I just saw some topics here and it seems it is not very straightforward, the restore procedure. And that was exactly the problem, timeshift did not work as expected. Maybe it is now fixed, no idea. It was some time ago.
I understand. Reading about it seems really complicated. But you can read my other thread about it. I did it as a mentioned in like 3 threads at Endeavouros forums.
Just commands to be done to get everything up and running. You donât really need to bother with all the complicated technical details.
I did it once a few months ago when I had Endeavouros, rolling back was so simple, just to test I booted to an earlier snapshot and rolled back to a a snapshot from the app BTRFS Assistant not TimeShift
It os much easier to boot directly from grub to an earlier snapshot than booting to a live session, install TimeShift then roll back.
Much easier and convenient.
Just donât get overwhelmed with the tech details of BTRFS.
Thatâs my experience of Manjaro Stable.
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When BTRFS fails; and fail it will in inexperienced hands (sooner or later), that complicated technical detail is something youâll wish you had bothered with.
BTRFS seems to have so many positive reasons for using it; thereâs no doubt there â but it requires more than the proverbial âwing and a prayerâ to use it â which is why I donât.
Despite becoming more familiar with BTRFS of late, Iâm still not 100% confident I could get myself out of trouble easily when an unexpected condition raises its ugly head.
But then, I do know how to RTFM. 
Just my 2 cents (keep the change).
I know for sure what you are talking about.
For me, I prefer to take it easy. I am wrong I know. But for me, even EXT4, NTFS, FAT, ⌠whatever⌠all I know about them other than their names is this is a different filesystem for Linux, for Windows. for USB flash disk⌠I do not really know the technicalities of any of them! So, BTRFS is just another file system.
I have read on many forums on many distros that users using BTRFS have been using it for quite a few years without issues.
So, I hope it will be the same with me!
I am not a computer Engineer or IT specialist. I am just a simple home user who just knows the ABCs. I donât need to be a mechanical engineer to drive a car.
I know many will disagree with me and they are right. But this is how I think.