Great success! A friend has a spare PC and when I talked about Parabola being fully libre, they were on board. I said that the wifi will probably not work and they said they didn’t care they will use ethernet cable anyway. They are interested in moving away from MSwindows. I said that Parabola is a bit ugly and so I’ll try to give them something like Manjaro (Xfce), they had already seen me use Manjaro and are on board.
So i’m a bit excited, but nervous, i’m not an expert on installing Desktop Managers like Xfce and configuring them. So it will be a learning experience for me at the same time!
Is there are list of packages that are 100% needed to transform an arch-based something (like Parabola LXDE) to Parabola-Xfce-in-the-style-of-Manjaro? If so I’d be most grateful for it. To get the ball rolling I’m thinking the following and I’ll update the list as people suggest things below:
the greeter
– lightdm-gtk-greeter
– lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings
Pamac
– pamac-gtk
– pamac-cli)
gtk?(maybe Parabola has this already and I just need to update but i’m guessing:)
– gtk-layer-shell?
– gtk-update-icon-cache
– gtk2
– gtk3
– gtk4
– gtkhash
– gtkhash-thunar
– gtkmm3
– gtkmm-4.0
– gtksourceview3
– gtksourceview4
– gtkspell
– lib32-gtk3(?if they have a 64bit processor, I can pass on this, right?)
– libcanberra
– lib32-canberra (?if they have a 64bit processor, I can pass on this, right?)
– libappindicator-gtk3
– libindicator-gtk3
is that everything? Are there manjaro-settings that should be included? Any config files i need to add/change?
I’m a bit apprehensive about ONE thing and that is giving them arch, with its very regular release schedule, it can be a lot of effort to stay up to date constantly. Should I try to find something that updates every 4-6 months, if they have trouble with updates I’ll be constantly going over to help them update.
I’m digging up the Parabola disk DVD right now. Very excited, the nudges do pay off!
(today in preparing this, I discovered the ‘Network Monitor’ for the panel! I’m already a fan! Also I learned about the possible role of xfconf in setting up computer kiosks! Very interesting and I may know another person who will be interested in this.)
Essentially you would need to remove/replace any of these.
Its not just things like firefox; its fonts, drivers, gstreamer, java, and the list goes on.
Are you sure you actually want 100% free software?
In the case of ‘theming’ Parabola > Manjaro
This will heavily depend on what is in their repos or how much you are willing to get your hands dirty.
You should be able to use manjaro packages or PKGBUILDs or raw resources to add stylistic addons rather easily. Things like icons and the like.
For software choices on the whole - some wont work, and others would break the intention of this libre install.
You can take a look at manjaro iso profiles to see lists of what they use
(though due to the nature of dependencies not all final packages will be listed)
Wouldn’t it be just easier to find some lxde theme instead of trying to make your distro, in which case you would be better off with arch or gentoo. And by the way, looking for every package and driver to be free and not close source is a bad idea. There are too many things that are not entirely open. As you saw, even finding a browser will be a problem.
There is/was an LXDE theme for Manjaro. I imagine that can still be found if one searches for it; or if someone knows which particular package names to look for. The same applies to XFCE, for that matter.
There has not been an lxde version of manjaro … ever?
Not in the last how ever many years at least.
There have been some LXQT spins though.
But even those I think most often used kwin window manager and in whatever case I cant recall some extra manjaro styling that was only specific to lxqt.
The link above is lxdm - display manager so I guess that counts sorta, but not for the desktop.
It is really not that difficult to customize any DE like Xfce4 or LXDE to your liking.
Install it, customize it - take hints from how other people/distributions have done it.
Good luck and have fun with eliminating anything and everything “not libre”.
as was said:
start with the kernel, likely severely limiting your user experience in the process
Your question more applies to Parabola, not Manjaro. This is the official Manjaro support forum.
As mentioned, neither Arch nor Manjaro uses the linux-libre kernel nor claims to only use only free software.
I’ve marked a post as the solution for the moment as that is the documentation one should be referring to as far as I’ve understood about what you’re asking.
Having said that, a wee bit of further discussion is fine for the time being for any clarification regarding Manjaro related things. Also fee free to mark another post as the solution later.
So many thought-provoking answers! Its not about purging but about cherrypicking i’m going to do a new install for them, but pull in as many nice things as humanly possible. I did searches for some of the blacklisted things and I personally prefer that the certain "webview"s are not included, It always felt weird when a non-browser tried to act like a browser.
It looks like people have diligently tried to move things off the blacklist by stripping out the non-libre elements.
I might end up moving to “manjarabola” after i do this job?!
I must ask though out of curiousity, I can remove all the lib32 packages on my 64bit setup, right? It won’t break my exciting manjaro system right? Out of interest why does my current manjaro system have both?
