Hi everyone!
After literally 4 days of failing to download Manjaro XFCE Minimal because of my slow internet, I finally manage to download it overnight last night.
Now, I’m no good at linux because this is my 1st time trying this and I’m a newbie. I mainly download XFCE because I’m not really into customization so I think XFCE is the suitable version for me.
I would mainly use Manjaro XFCE for programming and coding and no other heavy work (Aside from programming and coding, if it actually gets heavy).
Now, the main struggle I’m at is at the partitioning phase. I have 4GB DDR4 RAM, 128GB SSD, and 1TB HDD (My laptop is Acer Aspire 3 A314-32 if you’re wondering). Please research out my laptop and help my out with my specific partitioning as I’m afraid I might mess something up. Thanks in advance.
Welcome to the forum!
If your internet connection’s that slow, then Manjaro may not be the right distribution for you. Manjaro is a rolling-release distribution, and the idea is that you keep your system updated any time new updates are released.
That said, Manjaro is a curated rolling release, so if you are on the Stable branch, then you’ll get at most two bundled updates per month ─ there is always an announcement for that in the #announcements category ─ but those bundles can get big at times, depending on the evolution of the operating system.
Either way, if your internet is problematic, then perhaps you would be better off with a fixed-point release, because those receive very little in the way of updates ─ commonly only security patches and fixes for serious bugs.
According to what I can see , your laptop would be a 32-bit machine, and I’m afraid that’s going to be a bit of a problem, because Manjaro no longer supports any 32-bit processors.
For a while, there was a 32-bit Community Edition of Manjaro XFCE, but the maintainer of that edition has left the team little over a year ago, and the official Manjaro support for 32-bit was already discontinued a few years ago.
Well, Manjaro is an international community, and we’ve got members from all over the world. So chances are always that there’s someone at the keyboard, ready to answer questions. 
Well, okay, in that case, no problem then. 
Okay, in that case, we can proceed. 
Now, I’m assuming that you won’t be dual-booting this machine with Microsoft Windows or with any other operating systems? (With only 128 GB of storage, that would get pretty tight.)
Now, the important question here is whether your system has a legacy BIOS or the more modern UEFI firmware, and in the latter case, whether it actually boots in native UEFI mode or in legacy BIOS emulation mode.
The reason why this is important is that if the machine boots in UEFI mode, then you need to create a GPT partition table, whereas if it boots in legacy BIOS mode, then you can create either a GPT partition table or a legacy MS-DOS partition table. The latter is the simplest solution.
So here are your options…:
1. If the machine boots in native UEFI mode
Make sure that Secure Boot and Fast Boot are disabled in the UEFI firmware settings. Then you must create two partitions, or three if you also wish to use a swap partition. (You can use a swap file instead, though).
The first partition you create then must be formatted as FAT32 and must be about 512 MiB in size, and it must have the boot flag set, because that’ll be your EFI system partition. Then, considering the small size of your drive, I would recommend creating just one other partition, formatted with the ext4 filesystem, and with the mountpoint designated as /, which is the root directory. The EFI system partition must be mounted at /boot/efi.
2. If the machine has a legacy BIOS or a UEFI that boots in legacy BIOS mode
This will probably be the simplest solution for such an old machine. You can simply create an MS-DOS partition table and then you can use the whole drive for a single partition, with the ext4 filesystem, mounted as /.
Now, I don’t know whether the installer allows you to create a swap file, but this is fairly easy to set up afterwards. There are instructions on the forum and in the Wiki on how to do this.
Hi there! You guys are fast at responsing
About my internet connection: It’s fine because at night it’s fast and I’m a night guy and I’m used to it. If there are any updates available, I’m just gonna download it at night and leave it overnight, so it’s totally fine for me. I’m actually living in a province and as you might expect, internet is not that good but I’m lucky that at night it’s actually fast. What I meant from failing downloads is that, I downloaded it using my phone and I forgot to turn off power saving which has a feature of restricting my background data, thus cancelling the download (I’m dumb).
About my laptop, it states it’s a x64-based PC tho?
I’m not dual booting, I want to completely get rid of Windows and replace and allocate it all to Manjaro.
My laptop boots into BIOS. I have a bit of a problem earlier because I put a Supervisor password sometime ago and I forgot it but I was able to fix it now.
Well, it sounds like it’ll probably be the easiest installation then. You only need to create one partition, spanning the whole drive. Format it as ext4 and set its mountpoint to /. You can set a boot flag on it, but it’s not strictly necessary ─ the legacy boot loader doesn’t care about partition flags.
If the installer gives you the option to create a swap file, then best is to choose one that’s approximately 6 GiB. If not, then you can always create one afterwards.
Should I go with manual partitioning or erase disk option?
Also, there’s been a noticeable annoying delays on my mouse and keyboard presses, does this have something to do with the update or XFCE itself. I’ve tried KDE sometime ago and it did’t have this delays
Just use the “erase disk” option.
That is usually the consequence of a stuck process that’s eating up your CPU cycles, and it gets particularly nasty if it’s an I/O process.
Should I leave no swap and ext4 by default?
Well, you can create a swap partition ─ which I personally still prefer over a swap file ─ and then you should create one that’s at least the size of your RAM, but if you’re going to hibernate the machine, then it should be about 6 to 8 GiB in your case.
It is up to you whether you reserve a swap partition or whether you’ll create a swap file later, but it is a fact that with only 4 GiB of RAM, you’ll need one or the other, though.
And of course, if you’re going to create a swap partition, then you should leave some room when creating your ext4 partition for the root filesystem.
The laptop’s still expandable to 8GB RAM tho. But I think I’m gonna do this for later.
Ok, so here it goes.
Update: I sucessfully installed Manjaro! 
But after rebooting, I was directed to my old Windows 10. So I booted it up again and chosed Manjaro Linux. Why was my old Windows 10 still in there? I though erasing disk would completely allocate all of my storage to Manjaro and completely delete Windows? Why did this happen? Is there someting wrong I did?
Hmm… Are you sure it’s a legacy BIOS and not a UEFI? A UEFI stores boot entries in its non-volatile RAM. But if that is the case, then entering the UEFI settings will allow you to remove the Windows entry.
Edit: If the machine had Windows 10 on it earlier, then it’s a UEFI, because Windows 10 does not support a legacy BIOS boot anymore.
Can I just install it again but go with manual partitioning this time? Would manualling get rid of Windows completely?
Hmm, it state in the boot menu info “System BIOS version: v1.17”. Am I running on a BIOS or UEFI?
Can you first open up a terminal and issue the following commands?
lsblk
efibootmgr
In order to paste that output here, type three backticks (`), paste the output below that line, and then add another three backticks on the line underneath.
Now Manjaro become unresponsive.
There’s now 4 boot option menu: Windows Boot Manager (My old Windows 10), Philips USB Flash Drive (The flash drive I used to install Manjaro), Manjaro (Is this the Manjaro I installed?), and HDD0:WDC (I have no idea what this is but booting with it takes me to the same Manjaro)
Well, it looks like you’ve got a UEFI. The easiest way to get rid of the Windows boot entry is to do it from within the UEFI settings, under the boot options.
Dang, sorry for the trouble I cause and not noticing it, I though I was running BIOS.
I’m in the boot menu, what should I do next?
Some UEFI implementations have the same look & feel as a legacy BIOS version.
Sorry for the late reply, Manjaro’s getting unresponsive now.
Anyways, here’s the result:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 300M 0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2 8:2 0 931.2G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 0 119.2G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 100M 0 part
├─sdb2 8:18 0 16M 0 part
├─sdb3 8:19 0 118.1G 0 part
└─sdb4 8:20 0 1G 0 part
sdc 8:32 1 14.9G 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 1 2.2G 0 part
└─sdc2 8:34 1 4M 0 part
ootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0001,2001,0000,0003,2002,2003
Boot0000* Manjaro
Boot0001* Windows Boot Manager
Boot0002* USB HDD: Philips USB Flash Drive
Boot0003* HDD0: WDC WD10SPZX-21Z10T0
Boot2001* EFI USB Device
Boot2002* EFI DVD/CDROM
Boot2003* EFI Network