Manjaro architect critics and areas to improve

[benibilme]

I had to use manjaro architect to use install manjaro with lvm. I had a couple frustrations about it and I would like to share those, if anyone interested.

I use non latin1 keyboard layout and the architect forces me login with latin1. I had to plug a keyboard close to latin1 to able to login to system. Why an installer needs a login procedure, user and password in the first place?

After login, I had difficulty of setting up keyboard locale from terminal. Language and keyboard setup options must be handled one way or another initially. it is handled in the setup program but when something goes wrong as described below, I had to type on a non familiar keyboard layout.

setup program before doing anything tries to update itself and fails because of some dependency conflicts. Why does the setup program tries to update itself in the first place? Why can’t it continue as it is? I have downloaded the latest version of architect but it tries to update itself? I had to manually correct package dependencies.

setup is very fragile. It can or can not display the devices without clear reason. By just restarting setup program it corrects itself.

I hope maintainers see these and respond them. I am an avarage linux user. I use manjaro because of ease of installation. I had to resort architect to use lvm. I hope normal lvm become part of normal desktop installer. I really do not want to use architect again.

[anon88624618]

Please see this:

Maintainer(s) wanted

I’ve recently had trouble finding enough time for developing manjaro-architect. I’ve now been almost half a year without a proper hardware for testing, so it is difficult to get things done. Furthermore, I’m now focusing more on other projects like gnome edition and calamares (hybrid netinstall and better btrfs support). Manjaro-architect codebase is quite messy, and if I had time, I would probably rewrite it from scratch with narrower and more maintainable scope. I don’t want to abandon a work…

Especially:

Maintainer(s) wanted

Related but not the whole story. We had issues in manjaro-architect edition with stuck keys on tty, which could end wiping out users hard drive without warning. We could not release an iso with that issue naturally, so the manjaro-architect iso was horribly outdated and gained other issues as time passed. The version in other isos worked just fine. However, @philm wanted to drop those because manjaro-architect was going almost unmaintained (still working though, but not new features or bug fixe…

[Chrysostomus]

@benibilme

Why does the setup program tries to update itself in the first place?

It’s netinstall, the installation sources are updated constantly, so the installer needs the same once in a while too.

@benibilme

setup is very fragile.

Yes.

Manjaro-architect was not designed to be run in TTY like in manjaro-architect iso. It works much better if you run it in a regular terminal on other isos and do the partitioning with graphical tools like gparted or gnome-disks.

@benibilme

I hope normal lvm become part of normal desktop installer.

I thought calamares supported lvm in the manual partitioning mode. Doesn’t it? I personally hate lvm, so I haven’t tested it myself…

[benibilme]

@anon88624618, @Chrysostomus thank you all for detailed response.

Lvm is broken in normal manjaro desktop installer IMHO. I am advised to use architect in the forum. Anyhow, I glad to see that maintainers are aware about the issues with architect.

I have been hearing lvm but never used it, but for now, I am loving it. I am tight on disk spaces and lvm helps me to utilize disk spaces better. I am very bad at estimating partition sizes for the future. I am planning to take lvm snapshots to external drives before major manjaro updates as well since sometimes updates breaks my system.

I used to use brtfs several years ago but one day without any reason just refused to boot, load without any disk hardware problem, I have difficulty trusting anymore . I have installed ext4 and never had the same problem since.

Thank you all.