So here am I…
After trying Manjaro KDE on VBox for some time, I found it interesting enough to install it for real, alongside with OpenSUSE, LMDE, LinuxMint, Kubuntu, Q4OS, SolydXK and MX (so no other arch-based distros yet)
This mainly to try out an arch-based distro and also the missing things less easy to virtualize: networking, DVB-S2-TV with kaffeine, printer&scanner support etc.
Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten yet everything to working to my liking, and I am reporting those issues here as I have been able to fix them in all my other distros:
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despite smbclient is installed, I can’t see my NAS in dolphin’s networking area; maybe the firewall (where is it?) isn’t yet well configured or the SMB version needs to be configured
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although the needed firmware for my DVB Sky S950 card got well installed, the kaffeine device is well recognized and configured to Astra 19.2E, and all the channels from sqlite.db are OK, the TV doesn’t come up or play
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I have a very strange issue with vlc: upon close, it briefly shows a “rogue” and unwanted X window in the top left corner of the desktop. I have already reinstalled vlc, reset its settings and tried all the available visualization options in vlc without any change to the situation
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I also cannot stream TV from my STB ET9x00’s OpenWebInterface; vls opens the stream address but does not play; maybe also related to networking (firewall) issues…
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I also have a strange small black frame when opening some menus, like in Opera browser
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I’m not a fan of kernel theming either as it screws with grub customizer (which I like a lot to make a beautiful boot menu)
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MTP to my Galaxy M21 not working.
As personal side note, I also find it a little confusing to have so many different ways of software installation: a web site discover-manjaro-org, a console tool (pacman), its GUI brother pamac and then again the “applications” button in “Manjaro Hello”. Are we sure that all those tools manage dependencies well together and don’t walk on each other’s feet? I also need to get used to arch’s package management approach to recompile everything from the sources. It seems to be the more “clean” way compared to .deb or .rpm packages, but on the other hand seems to be slower and more “heavy”.
Well sorry to be a little negative here, but that’s the issues I have come across so far.
Don’t want to forget the highlights though:
- only 12 GB used so far; other distros usually end up somewhere around 16 or 17 GiB (OK, they often come with LibreOffice…)
- cutting edge KDE framework, for ex. lets me set transparency to many desktop mini pgms
- very snappy and reactive
- very rich set of tools/programs/software in AUR which - in other distros - often need some PPA or .deb from obscure sources
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Best,
thn